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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A Theater Troupe Of One’s Own
A few years ago, a Jewish women’s theater group from Pittsburgh performed a short piece at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance’s fourth International Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy in New York. Called “Dancing With the Torah,” it was about a girl who is banned from the men’s side of the synagogue on the holiday of…
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Honoring My Cousin’s Courage
Sima Vaisman and my father, Lipa (Leon) Halfin, were first cousins. Their mothers were sisters and they lived in the same house in Kishinev, Bessarabia (now Moldova). Sima’s mother, Genia, was a widow. And my grandmother Sarah asked her husband, a well-to-do merchant, to welcome the mother and daughter to live with them. It was…
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Comfort, Comfort
This week’s portion, Va-Et’hanan, includes two of the most famous sections of the Bible, a second version of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5:6-18, and the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. One could write endlessly about these crucial texts and their importance for the history of Judaism. However, I’ll focus instead on the Haftarah, Isaiah 40:1-26,…
The Latest
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August 19, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD In the wake of continuing unrest in Russia, and amid calls for democracy, Tsar Nikolai has begun to make noises about reforms. This is connected to a plan for wealthy Jews to provide huge loans to the Russian monarchy. Europe’s most important Jews are universally against such a plan…
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Looking Back August 12, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD This week, the Forward received a postcard from one Yidl Zaydman, in the shtetl of Rishkan in Bessarabia. It read as follows: “It’s not so good here, and even worse since the economy is so depressed. There has also been a riot of pogroms nearby, but always in other…
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Going Home Again
After a year of exhibits, lectures and articles to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the arrival of America’s first Jewish community, the themes from New York’s Center for Jewish History’s exhibit “Greetings From Home: 350 Years of American Jewish Life,” may feel familiar. The exhibit, a joint project of the American Jewish Historical Society in…
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Light Show; At the Israel Museum, Refreshing Looks at a Potentially Tired Cliche
From “Let there be Light” of biblical fame to modern sound-and-light shows, the notion of light as a metaphor or aesthetic tool is worn and tedious at best. Even as pietists, who claim dominion over Divine emanations, battle with the modernists who assert visual primacy, the serious metaphorical concept of light is clichéd and superficial….
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From ‘Gullboy (a novel)’ by Wade Rubenstein
Each month, in coordination with “Novel Jews,” our reading series in New York, the Forward publishes an excerpt from the work of that month’s series guest or guests. Though the reading series takes a hiatus this month, we figured everyone still could meet on the page. In celebration of summer, we offer readers a selection…
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Jewish Music Goes Grunge
Recently, before a packed audience in New York, a musician named Yaniv Tsaidi readjusted the clip holding down his yarmulke, stepped toward his microphone and began to scream. But the 29-year-old singer wasn’t just screaming. He was screaming his prayers. Tsaidi is the lead singer of Heedoosh, a new grunge-pop Jewish band that played to…
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Ultra-problematic
‘Thousands of Israeli ultranationalists rallied Tuesday against a Gaza pullout,” began a Reuters news dispatch on Wednesday, August 3. Is this an accurate or a biased description on Reuters’s part? “Ultra” is an odd prefix because it can have either a positive, negative or neutral connotation depending on what word it goes with. On the…
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Anna Kamienska in The Wilderness
The wilderness in the Torah is both a geographic place and a figurative region. Moses, in the first chapter of Deuteronomy, speaking “to all Israel,” recapitulates the journeys they have taken. He reminds them that God, condemning the generation that came out of Egypt, told them to turn back from the Promised Land after the…
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