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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So Mike Leigh Is Jewish After All. But Is It Good for the Jews?
Mike Leigh is responsible for some of the best British drama of the past 30 years — both theater and film, including “Abigail’s Party,” “Nuts in May,” Career Girls,” “Naked,” “Life Is Sweet,” “Secrets and Lies,” “Topsy-Turvy,” “All or Nothing,” and last year’s Oscar-nominated “Vera Drake.” But even for a “national treasure” (a tag that…
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Rehearsing for Reconciliation
Two men approach each other from across a field. You would be surprised to learn they are twins, so different are they now. But even before their paths diverged, they were not alike. One strides purposefully forward with the confidence in his own element, at home. Well he might, as he is surrounded by 400…
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November 25, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Vicious pogroms are still raging around Odessa. One woman had a cross cut into her stomach. Many victims’ eyes were plucked out and sand was rubbed into their empty eye sockets. On October 19th, outside of Odessa, 60 Jews were forced to lie down on railroad tracks, side by…
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Bukharan Vista
Over a period of seven years, photographer Zion Ozeri traveled to Uzbekistan, where he captured images of the Bukharan Jews, the Persian-speaking community that traces its history in the region back to the Middle Ages. The photographs are currently on display in New York at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in an exhibit titled “Bukharan…
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A Demanding Composer Meets His Orchestral Match
In between rehearsals at the Metropolitan Opera, composer Tobias Picker laughingly recalled another opera orchestra — which shall remain nameless — whose violinists, protesting his penchant for writing in the instruments’ extreme range, greeted him in rehearsal in mock submission, waving white handkerchiefs on the end of their bows. Nothing of the sort awaits him…
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A Tale of Two Trains
I am on a train heading into Magdeburg in eastern Germany, an hour or so from Berlin. Sixty-one years ago, my late mother was on a train headed for Magdeburg. Hers didn’t have a dining car or changing electronic displays updating the train’s speed and distance from its next station. She was one of hundreds…
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A Ladino Singer Rebels –– With Flamenco
Yasmin Levy should be a very happy woman. The Jerusalem-born singer is perhaps the most visible and popular performer of contemporary Ladino music. Critics gushed over her 2001 debut album, “Romance & Yasmin,” and well-received performances at the World of Music, Arts & Dance festivals in Singapore and Madrid in 2004 and 2005 have garnered…
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Inward Bound: State, Faith and the Jews
The Jewish Prison: A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism By Jean Daniel, translated by Charlotte Mandell Melville House, 214 pages, $14.95. * * *| In “The Jewish Prison: A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism,” an often impassioned, sometimes contradictory and always very French essay, Jean Daniel argues that contemporary Jews have…
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Entitlements
He is a boy of 8 or 9, sweeping out the entry to the master’s house. He hears his master, Abraham, within, speaking to someone he cannot see, worried that, as the only male born into the household, “this Eliezer of Damascus” might become heir to the household. It took him some moments to divine…
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A Life at Arm’s Length
Abraham was the perfect host. So was his nephew, Lot, the one who lived to the east, near the plains of Jordan. Those Terah boys come down from Ur of the Chaldees to Canaan and Haran and back again may have left their father’s houses with only a few possessions, but they packed etiquette in…
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Why Are There So Many Jewish Feminists?
This was originally posted online November 18, 2005, updated 20 Nov 2018. The Jewish Women’s Archive recently launched an online exhibit called Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, which uses a timeline, interviews and scans of historical artifacts to look at the contributions of Jewish feminists to Jewish and American history. (You can see it…
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