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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‘Intelligent Design’ Battles Rage On
Advocates of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools suffered a major loss last month, when a judge in Dover, Pa., struck down a proposed curriculum based on the concept. But this was not the last word on the subject. In fact, battles over Intelligent Design continue to rage, with fronts spreading across America. Parents in…
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How To Define Intolerance? A Roman Quandary
In late February 1997, a group of Roman artists and intellectuals met to prepare for the millennium. Unlike its cultish counterparts, this group did not expect any universal shifts to come with the year 2000. The members believed that life in the 21st-century would probably look much like it did in the 20th, and the…
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Adults Explore Faith in Holocaust Class
In the face of injustice and suffering, can one believe in God? Why do bad things happen to good people? How can civilized people torture and murder? In 160 cities around the world, students recently explored these questions in “Beyond Never Again,” a new adult education course about the Holocaust. Chabad’s Jewish Learning Institute offers…
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Catholic Colleges Give Jewish Programs a Lift
A cross balances atop the spire of Lyons Hall on Boston College’s campus. But a hint of a Jewish presence — a small Israeli flag — is visible through one window of the Gothic-influenced building. That’s the office of Maxim Shrayer, chair of the Slavic and Eastern languages department — which is also the home…
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Coincidentally Israeli Designers
To classify art based on geographical origin is to play a silly game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The Guggenheim exhibit The Aztec Empire recently showed the dangers of national taxonomies by including works of the Toltecs — whom the Aztecs sacrificed to their gods — and of the Olmecs, who are to…
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Survivor Uses Her Life as a Teaching Tool
Ice cream is what Gerda Weissmann Klein remembers most about birthdays during her youth in Bielsko, Poland. In those days, ice cream was made by hand only in the summer, and every year Klein’s mother made the first batch of the season in her honor. By early May, the lilacs were in bloom, but a…
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Holocaust Curriculum Shines Spotlight on Resistance
New Jersey mandated Holocaust education in its public schools more than a decade ago. But until now, something has been missing. The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education recommended last summer that teachers add a new subject to the standard curriculum about the Shoah: Jewish partisan fighters. Although individual teachers may have broached the subject…
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Celebrating a Composer Who Celebrates Multiple Cultures
Composer Osvaldo Golijov is being celebrated at New York City’s Lincoln Center with a month-long series of performances of his works, titled The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov. Musical America named Golijov composer of the year. His latest release, “Ayre” — based on traditional songs and poems in Ladino, Arabic and Hebrew — evokes the period…
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A Babel Biographer Chases His Moving Target
Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel By Jerome Charyn Random House, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Isaac Babel was an iconoclast whose small, mysterious oeuvre, delivered in a deft, compact Russian shaped at a time of revolution, becomes more alluring with the passage of time. As Jerome Charyn puts it in…
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Minors in Jewish Studies Make Major Gains
That explains how minor programs became possible, but there’s still the question of motivation: Why would a Catholic school set up a Jewish studies program? “It is part of the aspiration of Catholic colleges to be great colleges,” Fisher told the Forward. “Excellent colleges have Jewish studies; you can’t teach Western civilization without it.” The…
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Not Your Mother’s Neil Diamond
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A hip and really hot music producer seeks out an old and established artist — perhaps a bit past his prime — and talks him into working on an album. The point of the collaboration is to emphasize the singer’s craft and the song itself, and so…
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