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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A Call to Liberals To Take Back the Light
‘The separation of Church and State does not mean the segregation of religion from the public discourse,” Evangelical Christian Minister Jim Wallis said in a recent interview with the Forward. Wallis –– who lives in Washington, D.C., with his sons and wife, the Rev. Joy Carroll (the first woman to be ordained in the Church…
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The Transformative Tale of ‘GI Jews’
GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation By Deborah Dash Moore Harvard University Press, 368 pages, $25.95. * * *| Contemporary Jewish thought has been shaped by the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel and the transformation of the American Jewish community from a distant, peripheral outpost into the hub of…
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Torah Couture
Walking around the classroom, Rabbi Katz returns the weekly homework assignments, stops at Shira’s desk. “Shira, you know our assignments are to summarize each Torah portion, but you copied every single word.” “Details are important,” she says, looking at her returned homework. “A ‘C’? You’re giving me a ‘C’?” Rabbi Katz reminds himself to be…
The Latest
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The Cold War’s Strangest Bedfellows How Romania Sold Its Jews to Israel, and What It Got in Return
The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of The Extraordinary Secret Bargain Between Romania and Israel By Radu Ioanid Ivan R. Dee, 254 pages, $26. * * *| Surely the Cold War never produced stranger bedfellows than Shaike Dan and General Ghe- orghe Marcu. Dan, a Jew from Bessarabia, parachuted into Romania at the close…
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Papa Was a Rolling Stone How One Young Woman Pieced Together Her Father’s Story
Assembling My Father By Anna Cypra Oliver Houghton Mifflin, 368 pages, $25. * * *| The old chestnut about 1960s hedonism ran that if you remembered the decade, you weren’t really there. If the joke once reflected a popular perception of the times, it also missed a much more unpleasant truth. Released from social conventions,…
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For Women, Middle Ages Might Have Been Golden
Eight hundred years ago, thousands of Jewish Egyptian women refused to immerse in the ritual bath. Only Maimonides’s threat that they would lose their Ketubah money quelled the orchestrated rebellion, years after it began. A century later in Ashkenaz (Christian Europe), rabbis were astonished by the large number of Jewish women who refused to have…
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An Israeli Photographer Finds Holiness at the Rave
In a whirl of light and color, Tomer Ganihar believes he has photographed holiness. And for this Israeli photographer, it lives at the rave. “In the clubs, holiness is everywhere.” Ganihar said. “It’s like a temple. The clubs are the new synagogues, and the DJs are the rabbis.” Using long exposures and only a simple…
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Dwelling Among Them
After the action-packed stories of the first one-and-a-half books of the Torah — all of Genesis and the first part of Exodus — the main narrative abruptly changes course in the middle of the book of Exodus. Stories such as the creation of the world, the flood, the lives of the patriarchs, the slavery in…
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February 11, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • A telegram arrived this week from members of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia describing events over there. Part of it read, “At the behest of the Bund’s Central Committee, massive strikes have broken out in all regions where the Bund is active: in Vilna, Bialystok, Kovno, Dvinsk, Pinsk, Mohilev, Berditshev,…
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Looking Back February 4, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Melville Dewey, director of the New York State Library and inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, was called before the State Regents’ Library Committee to explain his position as president of an upstate hotel that not only restricts Jewish customers, but also openly advertises this fact. A number of well-connected Jews…
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He Wandered the Earth as an Exiled Man
Chronicles: Volume One By Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $24. * * *| Toward the end of last year’s rambling, barely coherent film “Masked and Anonymous,” Bob Dylan, its masked and anonymous star, spoke in voice-over one of his most direct and self-revelatory addresses. Fittingly, it was about the limits of what we…
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