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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Seeing Stars
Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish By Abigail Pogrebin Broadway, 400 pages, $24.95. * * *| In 1994, comedian Adam Sandler evoked the joys of counting Jewish celebrities with his hilarious ditty, “The Hanukkah Song.” Now, journalist Abigail Pogrebin is taking it one step further. Unwilling to settle for a mere headcount,…
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Israel Museum Donation
The photography department of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, recently received a $12 million gift from long-standing New York-based patrons Harriette and Noel Levine. The gift — the largest monetary donation that a visual-arts institution has ever received — will permit the museum’s already established photography department to conduct research and publish books and literature. The…
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The Silver Jews Return
This year, David Berman forgot when Yom Kippur was to begin. With his band, the Silver Jews, releasing a new album, “Tanglewood Numbers,” and Berman doing interviews to publicize it, he was convinced the holiday started a day later than it actually did. He realized his mistake an hour before the holiday began, and he…
The Latest
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Goodbye to All That, Again
Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer, and Its Aftermath By Paul Berman Soft Skull Press, 314 pages, $23.95. * * *| Pity the generation of 1968, those children born under the shadow of a catastrophe they did not make. In Germany and France, the children of the Third Reich and Vichy…
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South African Challah?
Michael Cole from Toronto writes: “My wife’s South African relatives refer to a Shabbat or festival challah as a ‘kitke.’ This seems to be a uniquely South African term, unknown, as far as I am aware, even among other people of Lithuanian descent. [Mr. Cole is referring to the fact that South African Jewry originated…
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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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The Sacred Ménage à Trois
The Bible’s stories tell of lives lived so long ago, in such a different clime, we look for difference and find types of ourselves. There are the women of today who choose to be childless, and there are women for whom childlessness is a calamity. Does their calamity compare with that of the Bible’s barren…
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November 11, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD The Forward received an emergency telegram from the Bund in Russia: “The forces of reaction are stretching us to the ends of our strength. The Black Hundreds have organized all over Russia. Jews are being murdered by the thousands. Entire towns and villages have been set ablaze: Akerman, Gaydiatsh,…
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Teach Your Children Well: Tzedaka Restores Justice
The word tzedaka, often translated as “charity,” comes from the Hebrew root tzedek, meaning “justice.” Its current usage was developed by the early rabbis, who recognized that the distribution of resources that results from a free-market economy must be adjusted by other means to ensure a fair society. Tzedaka is an expression of justice rather…
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The Young Face of Philanthropy
Jewish teenagers are learning that tzedaka involves more than slipping a few coins into the collection box at synagogue. In innovative programs around the country, teens are being given control over thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars in an effort to teach them the ins and outs of philanthropy — from reading budgets…
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