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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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,…
The Latest
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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…
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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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Looking Back November 18, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD In a private letter provided to the Forward by a resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the current pogroms in Russia are described: “Ten thousand people have been killed and wounded; children were thrown off of tall buildings; the bellies of pregnant women were cut open… the hospitals are…
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Saying Adios to a Jewish Book Series
In 1996, I received an invitation from Dana Asbury at the University of New Mexico Press to develop a series devoted to Jewish Latin America. I was entranced by the idea. Having come of age in the Mexico of the late 1960s and ’70s, I had made up my mind, in my early 20s, to…
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