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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Balaam’s Experience
This week’s portion, on the prophet Balaam and the king of Moab, Balak, is a sort of microcosm of the Torah in that it encapsulates so many of its greatest modes and themes. Balaam’s prophetic praise-poems, rising to the most sublime heights, assert the power of God’s blessing over His chosen people in the face…
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They’re Laughing at Jews in Germany
Dani Levy has tussled gray hair and a sleepy-looking face. It’s a classic Jewish face: tan skin, round features and flashes of irony in his small, dark eyes. He’s wearing a sweater and trousers and scratching his head, choosing his words carefully. As he reclines on a sofa and sips mineral water at Café Bilderbuch…
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Capturing a Free City’s Myriad Legacies
In March, our eldest daughter took us for a walk in Tel Aviv. A tour guide and educator, she pointed out the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik’s home, located on the street that bears his name. We walked the streets of the first Hebrew speaking city, whose first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, had been part of the…
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The Logic of Impurity
The ritual of the Red Heifer is one of the most mysterious rituals in the entire Torah. (I have no doubt that this first sentence has been written many times before, but the ritual is so mysterious — so contrary to “logic” — that it is virtually impossible to write about it without commenting on…
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Art Sailor, Expert In Knots, Ties the Matrimonial One
The June 19 wedding of Sarah Hoenig, 21, and Eric Kinzbrunner, 22, began with all the pageantry one would expect of an Orthodox ceremony. In a pre-wedding bedeken, the bride’s veil was lowered. The marriage contract, or ketubah, was signed at the groom’s table, or tisch, and the blessings were chanted and the glass broken…
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July 8, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Last week, the Forward predicted that the besieged Russian battleship Potemkin would celebrate its own Fourth of July. This, in fact, happened. On July 4, the soldiers and officers of the Potemkin formed a mutiny and joined the ranks of the revolutionaries. Just as the American revolutionaries declared themselves free from…
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An Army of One Ponders His Hunt for Israeli Oil
Oil: Israel’s Covert Efforts To Secure Oil Supplies By Zvi Alexander Gefen Books, 296 pages, $19.95. * * *| For most of his life, Zvi Alexander, a man with the guts of a gambler, was engaged in that most characteristic of Israeli pursuits: creating facts on the ground. Except in his case, these facts were…
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Brave New World Music
Israeli musicians Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan want you to get up, walk over to your CD rack, pull out the world-music samplers — yes, that “Putumayo Presents: Music From the Chocolate Lands” — and pitch them into the trash. Don’t sit just yet. They have a replacement suggestion: Balkan Beat Box, their New York-based…
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The Importance of Writing About Writing
A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World By Morris Dickstein Princeton University Press, 320 pages, $26.95. * * *| Why write about literature? The answer isn’t money, fame or love. Nor is it immortality, because criticism — a few exceptions notwithstanding — seldom lasts. So why? The question is posed and answered…
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July 1, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • After hearing reports of families living in terrible poverty, we sent a reporter to visit some of them. One family, the Grossmans, comprises a widow and her three children. They live on the fourth floor of a tenement on Manhattan’s Chrystie Street. Mrs. Grossman, whose late husband worked in a tin…
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Tracing the Legacy of German Jews in America
Who were the German Jews who came to America, and what have they become? Starting Over: The Experience of German Jews in America, 1830-1945, the recently opened exhibition at the Leo Baeck Institute, gives visitors a chance to meditate on these questions as well as to revisit some familiar and not so familiar faces and…
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