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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Going Home Again
After a year of exhibits, lectures and articles to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the arrival of America’s first Jewish community, the themes from New York’s Center for Jewish History’s exhibit “Greetings From Home: 350 Years of American Jewish Life,” may feel familiar. The exhibit, a joint project of the American Jewish Historical Society in…
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Light Show; At the Israel Museum, Refreshing Looks at a Potentially Tired Cliche
From “Let there be Light” of biblical fame to modern sound-and-light shows, the notion of light as a metaphor or aesthetic tool is worn and tedious at best. Even as pietists, who claim dominion over Divine emanations, battle with the modernists who assert visual primacy, the serious metaphorical concept of light is clichéd and superficial….
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From ‘Gullboy (a novel)’ by Wade Rubenstein
Each month, in coordination with “Novel Jews,” our reading series in New York, the Forward publishes an excerpt from the work of that month’s series guest or guests. Though the reading series takes a hiatus this month, we figured everyone still could meet on the page. In celebration of summer, we offer readers a selection…
The Latest
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Jewish Music Goes Grunge
Recently, before a packed audience in New York, a musician named Yaniv Tsaidi readjusted the clip holding down his yarmulke, stepped toward his microphone and began to scream. But the 29-year-old singer wasn’t just screaming. He was screaming his prayers. Tsaidi is the lead singer of Heedoosh, a new grunge-pop Jewish band that played to…
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Kubrick’s Unrealized Vision
When Stanley Kubrick died in March 1999 during the post-production of his final film, “Eyes Wide Shut,” he left behind several pet projects he had been working on for decades. These included a science-fiction riff on “Pinocchio” (later finished by Steven Spielberg as “A.I.”), a historical biopic of the life of Napoleon and a Holocaust…
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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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Looking Back August 5, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Galician childhood sweethearts Avrom and Dvosye Laykin had been happily married for 11 years. Their breakup has shocked the Lower East Side — not because of the split per se, but on account of the reasons behind it. In the official court documents, it says that after 11 years,…
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Cord Blood Transplants Eyed As Therapy for Some Diseases
In a medical development with potentially far-reaching effects, researchers have transplanted cord blood into newborns with a rare genetic disease, preserving their brain development and performing a life-saving treatment for babies with a fatal genetic disorder. Scientists from Duke University Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, infused cord blood stem…
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Wild at Heart
Maurice Sendak, the focus of a retrospective running at The Jewish Museum in New York until August 14, is the poet laureate of ambivalence. In a career of more than 50 years spent writing and illustrating children’s books, he has largely managed to avoid the sentimentalizing idealization that ruins so much of our thinking about…
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Scientists Seek New Crohn’s Treatments
Researchers are exploring two possible new treatments — one in trials, the other still speculative — for Crohn’s disease, a genetically linked digestive-tract disorder suffered by an estimated 500,000 Americans, mostly Jews of Ashkenazic descent. Discovered by Dr. Burrill Crohn in 1932, Crohn’s, which is similar to ulcerative colitis and inflammatory bowel disease, is a…
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Masada’s Jazz Legacy Endures
John Zorn’s Masada is one of the tightest, wittiest, most energetic, most appealing — simply one of the best — jazz bands to emerge in the past 15 years. So it’s no wonder that Zorn, a man as cleverly entrepreneurial as he is creatively passionate, should turn the name into an infinitely expansive genre. The…
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