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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How Could I Feast?
Jewish law shows gentle consideration for mourners, but Moses, in Leviticus 10:16-20, seems to display no such compassion. There we encounter Moses acting as a sort of quality-assurance inspector at the newly inaugurated Mishkan (Tabernacle). He is checking on whether his priestly cousins, newly installed in their sacerdotal functions, have fully implemented the elaborate rules…
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Looking Back April 14, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD All Jewish immigrants in New York know there are circumstances that force those in transit to remain in custody on Ellis Island for certain periods of time. Sometimes it is because they are ill, other times it is due to the fact that they do not have enough money…
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Miami Vice Versa
Saving South Beach By M. Barron Stofik University Press of Florida, 336 pages, $27.95. * * *| Miami’s South Beach neighborhood is an urban icon. Bringing new meaning to the term multicultural, South Beach is one of the only places in the United States where a twenty-something can have morning coffee with Grandma and her…
The Latest
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A Crowd of Voices Covers a Folk Legend
In last year’s “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,” filmmaker Lian Lunson pays homage to the man often considered the Canadian equivalent of Bob Dylan by filming a succession of performers singing Cohen’s songs, in scenes that emphasize just how beautiful his songs are when sung by someone else. When Cohen sings his own works —…
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State of Emergency: The Demise of Secularism
The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously By Jacques Berlinerblau Cambridge University Press, 232 pages, $19.99. * * *| God, it turns out, is not dead, but secularism might be — unless it deigns to take another look at itself, at God and at God’s book, and seeks to study and know what…
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From the Stage To the Page
Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays Edited by Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick Foreword by Theodore Bikel University of Texas Press, 587 pages, $24.95. * * *| Published plays — especially those in anthologies — tend to be dismissed by the casual browser as specialty items, of interest only to students of theater history or to actors…
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A Lebanese Writer’s Palestinian Story
Elias Khoury has enough to deal with in his hometown. The editor in chief of the weekly literary supplement of An Nahar, the secular, leftist Beirut daily, recently lost two colleagues: columnist Samir Kassir and publisher Gebran Tueni, both of whom were presumably murdered by the Syrian government. “Everybody like me — intellectuals who are…
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A ‘Matzo’ Mystery
We’re all eating it this week — in some cases, more than we’d like to — but why on earth do we spell it “matzo,” or “matzoh”? What Jew says, or ever did say, “mah-tso,” pronouncing the last syllable to rhyme with “oh” or “glow”? Ashkenazic Jews always have said “MAH-tse,” with the last syllable…
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Is God Just?
The portion read on the intermediate Shabbat of Pesach, Exodus 33:12-34:26, contains some of the most extraordinary passages in the Torah. Moses asks God to “show me now Thy ways, that I may know Thee” (Exodus 33:13) and gets the comforting response, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest.” But…
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The Essential Louis Zukofsky
Selected Poems By Louis Zukofsky, edited by Charles Bernstein Library of America, 191 pages, $20. * * *| Louis Zukofsky, born into a pious, Yiddish-speaking household on New York City’s Lower East Side in 1904, seems to have jumped fully formed into American poetry. In 1928, when he was 24, his mentor and intellectual sparring…
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The Goddess Matriarchy
Barry Dancis writes: “I recently began reading the book ‘When God Was a Women’ by Merlin Stone, written some 30 years ago. In it she points out that Near Eastern societies from 9000 BCE or thereabouts to 2500 BCE or somewhat later revered a supreme female deity or goddess (Astarte, Isis, etc.), and that the…
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