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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Minors in Jewish Studies Make Major Gains
That explains how minor programs became possible, but there’s still the question of motivation: Why would a Catholic school set up a Jewish studies program? “It is part of the aspiration of Catholic colleges to be great colleges,” Fisher told the Forward. “Excellent colleges have Jewish studies; you can’t teach Western civilization without it.” The…
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Celebrating a Composer Who Celebrates Multiple Cultures
Composer Osvaldo Golijov is being celebrated at New York City’s Lincoln Center with a month-long series of performances of his works, titled The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov. Musical America named Golijov composer of the year. His latest release, “Ayre” — based on traditional songs and poems in Ladino, Arabic and Hebrew — evokes the period…
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Adults Explore Faith in Holocaust Class
In the face of injustice and suffering, can one believe in God? Why do bad things happen to good people? How can civilized people torture and murder? In 160 cities around the world, students recently explored these questions in “Beyond Never Again,” a new adult education course about the Holocaust. Chabad’s Jewish Learning Institute offers…
The Latest
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Orthodox Rethinking Campus Outreach
Following on the heels of Chabad-Lubavitch’s successful campus programs, other Orthodox groups are now reaching out in new ways to college students of every Jewish denomination. Non-Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox Jews — or mitnagdim — have adopted an approach that is startlingly similar to the one presented by Chabad, the Hasidic sect whose outreach efforts have made…
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Survivor Uses Her Life as a Teaching Tool
Ice cream is what Gerda Weissmann Klein remembers most about birthdays during her youth in Bielsko, Poland. In those days, ice cream was made by hand only in the summer, and every year Klein’s mother made the first batch of the season in her honor. By early May, the lilacs were in bloom, but a…
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Deli Maker Finds Delicious Way To Raise Funds
The heads of Abeles & Heymann Gourmet Kosher Provisions are thinking about hot dogs in a whole new way. Concerned about the rising costs of education at Jewish day schools, A&H co-presidents Seth Leavitt and David Flamholz have decided to take action. They recently launched A&H for ABCs, a yearlong initiative in which a percentage…
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A Babel Biographer Chases His Moving Target
Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel By Jerome Charyn Random House, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Isaac Babel was an iconoclast whose small, mysterious oeuvre, delivered in a deft, compact Russian shaped at a time of revolution, becomes more alluring with the passage of time. As Jerome Charyn puts it in…
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Day School in N.Y. ‘Adopts’ Gaza’s Displaced Students
It started as a simple letter-writing campaign: The students at an Orthodox boys’ school in Monsey, N.Y., sent notes expressing their sympathy to kids their age who were forced to move last summer when Israel evacuated settlements in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. But then the project grew, and soon Yeshiva Darchei Noam…
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Not Your Mother’s Neil Diamond
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A hip and really hot music producer seeks out an old and established artist — perhaps a bit past his prime — and talks him into working on an album. The point of the collaboration is to emphasize the singer’s craft and the song itself, and so…
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Day Schools Balance Science, Religion
Since they are private institutions, Jewish day schools do not face church-state issues when it comes to teaching about creation. Nonetheless, the subject still poses challenges for day school educators. “Families who choose religious education do so with the understanding that schools will take on issues of morality, faith and theology,” said Dr. Marc Kramer,…
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America Gets a New Tocqueville
Following in the footsteps of his countryman, famed French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy — or BHL, as he is widely known — will release “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,” the result of a yearlong journey through America. Though Lévy is careful not to compare himself with Tocqueville — the 19th-century French aristocrat…
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