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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Mixed-heritage Family Deals With Genetic Tragedy
When Rachaeli Fier uttered her first word — abba, or father — her parents had no idea it would be her last. Rachaeli was born a perfect baby girl, a “designer baby,” as the hospital’s delivery staff called her. Now, Eric and Nicole Fier watch helplessly as Rachaeli spirals downward in rapid, steady regression. Two-and-a-half-year-old…
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Breast Cancer Test Patent Causing a Furor
An American firm’s new European patent on a screening test for a genetic mutation that causes breast cancer has created an uproar among geneticists in Israel and Europe, who say the patent raises ethical questions because it targets Ashkenazic Jews. The firm, Myriad Genetics, of Salt Lake City, Utah, was granted the European patent for…
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Zebrafish Provide Key to Unlocking Secrets of Fanconi Anemia
The zebrafish, an inch-long fish indigenous to the Ganges River in East India and Burma, is proving to be a useful animal for understanding Fanconi Anemia. Drs. John Postlethwait and Tom Titus of the University of Oregon’s Institute of Neuroscience told the Forward that they have almost completed mapping the protein sequence of the last…
The Latest
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Gene Found for Dystonia-related Disorder
Scientists have unlocked the gene responsible for a rare and debilitating genetic disorder. Rapid-onset dystonia-parkinsonism, or RDP, is a rare genetic disorder whose sufferers share symptoms with both dystonia and Parkinson’s disease. In an article published in the July 21 issue of the neuroscience journal Neuron, a research team detailed its discovery that six unique…
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The Man Behind a Legendary Effort
Opportunities That Pass: An Historical Miscellany By Cecil Roth, edited by Israel Finestein and Joseph F. Roth, foreword by Raphael Loewe Vallentine Mitchell, 256 pages, $28.95. * * *| Of all the scholarly efforts in Jewish studies, none may be more influential than the 16-volume “Encyclopedia Judaica.” Since its publication in Jerusalem, in 1972, it…
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Plumbing Berlin for Yiddish Fiction
The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson By Dovid Bergelson, Translated by Joachim Neugroschel City Lights Publishers, 120 pages, $14.95. * * *| Berlin’s role as the capital of Nazi Germany has crowded out most other memories of the city’s 20th-century Jewish history. In the 1920s, though, the city was a place…
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Roman Holidays
One thing to know about Alain Elkann, the much-discussed French-Italian-Jewish author, journalist, and man of Roman society, is that a lot of the talk is talk about his face. Think of a youthful, smoldering Richard Gere, then think one better. It is a face impossible to ignore, and it is not the face he has…
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Two Albums Offer Gems of Gypsy Melodies
Before the advent of the European Union and its open borders, long before Germany had been invaded by the Turks and France by the North Africans, two groups vied for the distinction of being the most despised people in Europe: Gypsies and Jews. More often than not, the Gypsies — or Roma, as they prefer…
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The Son Also Rises
In the Perlman family, musical talent is a family affair. Most people are familiar with Itzhak Perlman, the internationally renowned violin virtuoso. But his wife, Toby, is also an accomplished violinist. The couple’s daughter Navah is a concert pianist who tours worldwide both with her trio and as a soloist, and daughter Ariella plays the…
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July 22, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A riot occurred at the opening ceremony for a new synagogue in St. Louis. After the doors of Hevrat Sfarad opened to let in those who had gathered for the ceremony, the new synagogue filled up quickly and hundreds of people who had been waiting were unable to get…
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Standing Again With Lilith; The Long and Winding Roads of Jewish Feminism
These days, everyone is post-something: postmodern, post-Zionist — and, in many quarters, post-feminist. Like other “revolutionary” ideologies, feminism has come to mean different — indeed, diametrically opposed — things to different people. To some, it is the simple belief that women should be treated as equal to men: for example, that they should not be…
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