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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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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December 2, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Manhattan’s Lower East Side residents Rebecca Sadowsky, Sarah Leshinsky, Beka Rosenberg and Otto Levsky, who range in age from 9 to 14, appeared this week in the Essex Market Court, accompanied by their parents. All four children had been arrested for truancy, and records indicated that they had not…
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One Man Chronicles Centuries of Synagogue Music
Appearances can be deceiving, especially online. For example, one would never guess from its plain vanilla Web site that Google is a hyper-capitalized behemoth worth more than General Motors and Ford put together. Conversely, the Web site of the Jewish Music Heritage Project gives the impression of a lavishly funded institutional undertaking. Dedicated to providing…
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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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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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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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News Middlebury College Hillel votes to rebrand, distancing from parent group on Israel
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