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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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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Ultra-problematic
‘Thousands of Israeli ultranationalists rallied Tuesday against a Gaza pullout,” began a Reuters news dispatch on Wednesday, August 3. Is this an accurate or a biased description on Reuters’s part? “Ultra” is an odd prefix because it can have either a positive, negative or neutral connotation depending on what word it goes with. On the…
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Anna Kamienska in The Wilderness
The wilderness in the Torah is both a geographic place and a figurative region. Moses, in the first chapter of Deuteronomy, speaking “to all Israel,” recapitulates the journeys they have taken. He reminds them that God, condemning the generation that came out of Egypt, told them to turn back from the Promised Land after the…
The Latest
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Looking Back August 12, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD This week, the Forward received a postcard from one Yidl Zaydman, in the shtetl of Rishkan in Bessarabia. It read as follows: “It’s not so good here, and even worse since the economy is so depressed. There has also been a riot of pogroms nearby, but always in other…
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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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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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Breast Cancer Test Patent Causing a Furor
An American firm’s new European patent on a screening test for a genetic mutation that causes breast cancer has created an uproar among geneticists in Israel and Europe, who say the patent raises ethical questions because it targets Ashkenazic Jews. The firm, Myriad Genetics, of Salt Lake City, Utah, was granted the European patent for…
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Zebrafish Provide Key to Unlocking Secrets of Fanconi Anemia
The zebrafish, an inch-long fish indigenous to the Ganges River in East India and Burma, is proving to be a useful animal for understanding Fanconi Anemia. Drs. John Postlethwait and Tom Titus of the University of Oregon’s Institute of Neuroscience told the Forward that they have almost completed mapping the protein sequence of the last…
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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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