This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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Rabbi Sets a Message to Music
Shawn Zevit is practicing what he preaches. A Philadelphia-based Reconstructionist rabbi who serves as a visiting rabbi at Pittsburgh’s Congregation Dor Hadash, Zevit is also a singer, songwriter and guitarist with two full-length CDs to his credit. With musical influences ranging from The Beatles to indie rock, from soul to R&B, Zevit’s new album, “Sanctuary,”…
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Mem Bernstein
MEM BERNSTEIN In 2002, Bernstein made our list as one of the most dynamic, if most media-shy, Jewish “venture philanthropists.” As a string of recent successes attest, her influence has only grown in the past three years. Bernstein oversees not one but two major foundations. Both were started with the money of her late husband,…
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Playing Fill-in-the-Blanks With a Father’s Life
Not Me By Michael Lavigne Random House, 320 pages, $24.95. Between what one is told and what one is able to infer, there lies a distant and beckoning truth: the Parent as Human Being. It glimmers beyond our grasp, always sought after but never obtained, the object of conjecture but never of understanding. For some,…
The Latest
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Ladino: Alive in Song, If Not Speech
For centuries after their expulsion in 1492, Sephardic Jews kept their new homes sounding like medieval Spain. In places as disparate as Amsterdam, Turkey and Greece, the Sephardim continued to live and pray in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language, up until the 20th century. Today there are not many opportunities to hear the language spoken, but…
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Food Fight
The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate Edited by Ruth Fredman Cernea University of Chicago Press, 184 pages, $18 — As if we didn’t have enough on our plates, here’s something new to argue about. Not that Jews don’t have a fine history of conflict: Hillel vs. Shammai, Bundists vs. Zionists, Labor vs. Likud. But now, to have…
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A Novel Set on –– but Not Quite About –– September 11
The Days of Awe By Hugh Nissenson Sourcebooks, 320 pages, $18. — Hugh Nissenson is not the kind of writer who publishes a book a year. He doesn’t even publish one per decade. But when Nissenson does commit ink to page, he always engages the big issues. He’s ever ready to examine different pockets of…
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NOVEL JEWS: Henry Roth Tribute
This month, the Novel Jews monthly reading series will host a special tribute to Henry Roth. Henry Roth (1906-1995), author of the great immigrant novel “Call It Sleep,” was one of the giants of American literature. After completing his first book in 1934, Roth lapsed into a legendary six-decade silence. He re-emerged with “Mercy of…
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Wedding the Personal and Political
Politics so comprehensively saturates Israeli life that even the most apolitical Israeli film ends up invoking it, if only by assiduous omission. In “The Syrian Bride,” opening November 16 in New York, Israeli director Eran Riklis not only acknowledges the elephant in the room but also gives it central billing. Ironically, he ends up with…
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Exploring What Binds –– and Divides –– Jews and Christians
Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History By David Klinghoffer Doubleday, 256 pages, $24.95 — The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament’s Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book By Julie Galambush HarperSanFrancisco, 352 pages, $24.95. — In the past few years, there has been a growing interest in the New Testament…
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The Roman Era, Revised
In many Jewish imaginations, the Roman period — from the conquest of Judea in 64 BCE to roughly the sixth century C.E. — is remembered as a time of tragedy and catastrophe. The early years of the Common Era witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple and the devastation of the Jewish populace in Israel…
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My Tower of Babel
I spent every holiday — American, Jewish and otherwise — with my mother’s Cuban family. At Rosh Hashanah and Passover we crammed into my Aunt Rachel’s five-room flat, which was decorated with ashtrays from various restaurants and hotels to which she had never been. Seated at the holiday table we were in a collapsed Tower…
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