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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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…
The Latest
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Supplements Holding Hope As Treatment For Canavan
New research indicates that acetate supplements may be an effective therapy for Canavan disease, a degenerative and ultimately fatal disorder of the brain and central nervous system. Currently, there is no cure for Canavan disease, a recessive genetic disorder that is carried by one in 40 Ashkenazic Jews. Canavan patients have a mutation of the…
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Forced March
Crazy. He stumbles, flops, gets up, and trudges on again. He moves his ankles and his knees like one wandering pain, then sallies forth, as if a wing lifted him where he went, and when the ditch invited him in, he dare not give consent, and if you were to ask why not? perhaps his…
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‘Neverland’ Producer Searches for a Cure to Son’s Bloom’s Syndrome
In the press notes to the 2004 movie “Finding Neverland,” director Mark Forster ruminates on the “deep human need for illusions and dreams” and “belief in the face of tragedy.” Producer Richard Gladstein does not offer anything quite so sentimental when I ask him, about one year after the film’s blockbuster success, to muse on…
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Windy City Offers a Window Into the Heart of America
The Washington Story By Adam Langer Riverhead Books, 416 pages, $24.95. * * *| Once may have been an honest mistake, but twice, it must be a trend. Adam Langer’s second novel is titled “The Washington Story,” though it has little to do with our nation’s capital — just as his debut, “Crossing California,” took…
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Where To Go for Support and Help
CANAVAN FOUNDATION 450 West End Avenue, #10C New York, NY 10024 (212) 873-4640 (877) 4-CANAVAN Fax: 212-873-7892 www.canavanfoundation.org [email protected] This volunteer nonprofit foundation’s goals are to support research and to educate the medical community and at-risk populations. FANCONI ANEMIA RESEARCH FUND 1801 Willamette Street, Suite 200 Eugene, OR 97401 (541) 687-4658 (800) 828-4891 Fax: 541-687-0548…
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Forced March
Sometime in early 1946, about one year after the Red Army liberated Hungary, local officials in the western Hungarian town of Abda unearthed a mass grave filled with the decomposing corpses of 22 Jewish slave laborers. Among the bodies lay the 35-year-old Hungarian-Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti, executed in November 1944 by a bullet to the…
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Annual Guide to Jewish Genetic Diseases
The Forward presents this section to provide information on some of the more serious Jewish genetic diseases. There are about 20 “Ashkenazic diseases,” not counting the higher rates of at least four cancer-related genes. The diseases are more prevalent in the Eastern European Jewish population because of centuries of endogamy — literally, “marrying within.” Familial…
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The Man Behind a Legendary Effort
Opportunities That Pass: An Historical Miscellany By Cecil Roth, edited by Israel Finestein and Joseph F. Roth, foreword by Raphael Loewe Vallentine Mitchell, 256 pages, $28.95. * * *| Of all the scholarly efforts in Jewish studies, none may be more influential than the 16-volume “Encyclopedia Judaica.” Since its publication in Jerusalem, in 1972, it…
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