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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A Writer, a Woman And a Jew
There’s an old chestnut, “The more specific the writing, the more universal its appeal.” You can say, “Six-year-old Lisa Levine is afraid of loud noises.” Or you can say, “When 6-year-old Lisa Levine hears thunder, she shuts her eyes, kisses the tiny Jewish star hanging on the chain around her neck, and says the Sh’ma.”…
The Latest
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January 13, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Most of the tenants of a tenement on Manhattan’s Chrystie Street confuse the names of two of the other residents: Rosenthal, the watchmaker, and Rosenblum, the building super. But the two men couldn’t be more different. When Rosenthal hung a fine-looking sign on his door advertising his watch repair…
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La Petite Jerusalem
Religious practice, especially of the Jewish kind, is often an iffy matter on screen. As dramatized in such recent films as “A Stranger Among Us” and “A Price Above Rubies,” Orthodox Judaism is rendered tantalizingly foreign. When the modern world intrudes in these films, as it inevitably does, the result is a clash of matter…
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The Chosen People
Give Igal Hecht credit for trying. Making a movie about theology is tricky enough; making one about a fringe theology requires a miracle. In his ambitious but frustrating documentary, the Canadian filmmaker has taken on that perpetual urban curiosity, Jews for Jesus. By the choice of subject, one expects a flurry of proselytizing and street-side…
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Love Iranian-American Style
In “Love Iranian-American Style,” director Tanaz Eshaghian tackles the subject of marriage in the Persian-American community, where she interrogates, challenges and otherwise needles her relatives over their views on coupling. The Eshaghians fled the ayatollah’s brutal regime after the 1979 revolution, but the totalitarians they left behind need not worry; Eshaghian’s questioning might be considered…
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Best Sister
The charms of Ira Wohl’s family documentary, “Best Sister,” sneak up on you in the manner of a good deli sandwich, which may sound weird but for the fact that the film devotes key scenes to the pursuit of fine cured meats and other (deceptively important) banalities. The film is the final in a trilogy…
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Pork and Milk
Breaks from tradition also weigh on the mind of Valérie Mréjen, director of the pleasingly low-key French documentary “Pork and Milk.” Through a series of interviews, Mréjen throws a light on a number of young Israeli men who also happen to be have left the fold of ultra-Orthodoxy: a chef, a cantor with the radical…
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Language Lover Gets Back to His Roots
HebrewTalk: 101 Hebrew Roots and the Stories They Tell By Joseph Lowin EKS Publishing Company, 220 pages, $27.95. * * *| Joseph Lowin comes from a long line of lovers of the Hebrew language — from medieval grammarians Menahem ben Saruk, Dunash Ben Librat, ben Hayujj and ibn Janakh, who invented Hebrew grammar, and the…
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The Second Tragedy at Bergen-Belsen
After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945 By Ben Shephard Schocken Books, 288 pages, $25. * * *| Schocken Books, 288 pages, $25.In the middle of the night, when my father cannot sleep, he will pick up the phone in London and call me in New York, where he knows it is still evening, to…
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