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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The Shadow of God
The details of the building of the tabernacle are relentlessly mundane, and we read them trusting that they might perhaps be of interest to a committee of architects, accountants and engineers whose arcana we have never studied and whose work is utterly mysterious to us. “And of the thousand seven hundred seventy and five shekels…
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Giving One’s Life
There’s a Hebrew term that looks like it’s going to be heard a lot in the coming months. It’s mesirut-nefesh, which means, literally, “giving one’s life,” and, in ordinary language, “devotion” or “giving one’s all.” But for the settlement movement that is now gearing up to fight this summer’s planned disengagement from Gaza, mesirut-nefesh has…
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Radio Days: A Life Heard
35 and up category Winner: Seymour Zimilover Age: 81 – In the days before television, radio was the major source of entertainment for most people. It was even more important than the movies in that going to the movies was a once or twice-a-week affair, but radio was a seven-day activity. Among the major stations…
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Trouble at Christmastime
15-18 category Winner: Mira Scarvalone Age: 15 I come from an interesting family. My father was raised a Christian and my mother, as an adult, converted to Judaism. I have only one Jewish grandparent. So technically, I am only a quarter Jewish. But I was never faced with the choice of being a Christian, or…
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The Winners; A ‘Naturalized’ New Yorker
10-14 category Winner: Mattie Kahn Age: 12 I am walking down the street when I see a woman reaching up to check that the scarf on her head is in place as she pushes her baby. In an instant I identify the head covering worn by some religious women upon their marriage. To those who…
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The Day After Yom Kippur
Just last week, we were reading about an outrageous sin, the fashioning of a golden calf by Aaron the Priest, Moses’ brother. He did this at the behest of the nervous Israelites, whose anxiety was pushed beyond their tolerance limit by Moses’ long stay on Mount Sinai. The story of that manic insistence upon a…
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March 4, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Ten Jewish derelicts were hired to recite Psalms for a person who had died. The relatives of the deceased gave one of them, Aaron Kalish, a bit of cash for all of them. Kalish went out and bought some cake and a bottle of illegally distilled alcohol for the group. He…
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An Israeli Film Juggles High Moral Purpose and Comedy
It’s nice to see a filmmaker indulge his own obsessions as thoroughly as Eytan Fox does with his new film, “Walk on Water.” Fox’s last film, “Yossi & Jagger,” was a gay romance set in the Israeli military, and his new work cooks with the same ingredients, adding in Israeli-German relations and the ever-present specter…
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The Boy From Baku
The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life By Tom Reiss Random House, 464 pages, $25.95. * * *| The arid, windswept capital of Azerbaijan is not a tourist mecca. Most travelers to Baku come in search of oil, not romance. But for many Azeris and not a few foreigners, a trip…
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Biblical Memoirs: Cutting Edge or Old Hat?
One of the many questions that postmodernism encourages is who gets to write and to “own” stories. Often the process of “owning” a narrative disenfranchises many of the story’s players, who never realize a platform to advance their own perspectives. One of the best illustrations of this is the Bible, which introduces a host of…
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Among the Tweeds and the Herringbones
19-34 category Winner: Paul Fischer Age: 32 As if I didn’t yet possess the language for silent prayer, I was dismissed from the temple sanctuary during the Amidah as a child. Perhaps it was an attempt to shield me from the vulnerable site of parents wrapped solely in prayers, muttering secret words meant to be…
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