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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A Century of Israeli Art, on View in Berlin
Pogroms in Russia before and during the First World War sent waves of Jewish emigrants fleeing to Palestine. Around the same time, Jewish painters from across Europe settled in Tel Aviv, where an arts scene flourished in the 1920s, planting the seeds of Jewish national identity. It is this compelling chapter that opens “The New…
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Holding Patterns
When sleep eludes me, I conjugate Spanish verbs. I begin with nice, regular verbs in the indicative mood. Hablar, comer, vivir: to speak, to eat, to live. I move methodically through the present tense, the preterit past, the past imperfect, the future and the conditional. Then on to forms requiring auxiliary verbs — the perfect,…
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Bank Plays It Safe With Sophomore Effort
The Wonder Spot By Melissa Bank Viking, 336 pages, $24.95. —– This might be the year of the high-expectation second novel. After putting out a critical and commercial darling of a book at an impossibly young age, every new literary sensation must follow up with a second, and the path there is littered with brutal…
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Much Ado About Something
Judy Frankel rushes into the Hillel cafeteria, late to campus as usual after her weekly volunteer work at the AIDS hospice downtown. How good to engage in tikkun olam, repairing the world — keeping patients company during dinner, holding this hand and that, eliciting memories of healthier times. But afterward, she needs the comfort of…
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Conservative Jews In Israel Splitting With Top Leader
The Israeli branch of the Conservative movement is set to part ways with its longtime president, Rabbi Ehud Bandel, the Forward has learned. Movement insiders familiar with the situation say that the Israeli branch, known as Masorti, faces a severe budget crisis. In an effort to close the gap, one source said, Bandel is being…
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Study’s Claim On Intelligence Of Ashkenazim Spurs a Debate
The biological distinctiveness of ethnic groups is fraught scientific territory, but a new study plunges into the debate by theorizing that the high intelligence of Ashkenazic Jews is in the genes. The study, which will be published in the upcoming issue of Journal of Biosocial Science, argues that natural selection favored more intelligent Jews during…
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Iran Sanction Bill Loses Momentum As Administration Presses Diplomacy
WASHINGTON — The pro-Israel lobby’s top legislative priority — a bill aimed at tightening sanctions on Iran — is losing momentum in Congress now that the Bush administration is urging congressional leaders to hold off in favor of diplomatic efforts to quell Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Two weeks ago, at the annual policy conference of the…
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Restore the American Dream By Addressing the State of Unions
My grandfather came to the United States from Austria in the early 1900s and found work as a butcher. Back then, this was a country where if you worked hard, you had a reasonable chance of achieving the American dream. Immigrant workers built a strong union movement that raised living standards — not just for…
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In Airwaves War, Israeli Army Takes Its Case to Arab Media
JERUSALEM — Eitan Arusy, the Israeli military’s point man in dealing with the Arab media, earned his paycheck May 19. That day, millions of Arab viewers watching the evening news on Al Jazeera were treated to footage from an Israeli army drone. The 10-second clip depicted a missile strike on a group of Hamas members…
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Plan To Revive Biblical Sanhedrin Receives Boost
A nascent effort to re-establish the ancient rabbinical body of the Sanhedrin received a significant boost Monday when world-renowned scholar Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz agreed to serve as the body’s president. The original Sanhedrin, the supreme legislative body in ancient Israel, comprised 71 leading scholars who issued rulings on a wide array of ritual and policy…
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‘Who Is a Taoist?’ Principal’s Job Hinged on Definition
Academic politics are often esoteric and never pretty. But in what appears to be a first, the fate of a middle-school principal in West Orange, N.J., was determined by a rabbinic debate over the definition of “who is a Taoist.” For months, Aaron Kriegel, a pulpit rabbi in West Essex, N.J., has urged officials at…
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