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 Year in Pictures
On the first of March in the year 2005 (or the 20th of Adar I, 5765, according to the Hebrew calendar) some 200,000 Jews filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden and auditoriums around the world to celebrate the reading of the last page of the Talmud. For centuries, Orthodox Jews have studied Talmud daily,…
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Rethinking the Divine
In 1982, noted Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote that “the question of women and Judaism is more crucial than all the political problems of the people and its state. Failure to deal with it seriously threatens the viability of the Judaism of Torah and Mitzvoth in the contemporary world.” Despite the passage of 20 years,…
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The Aphorism Master
Yes damns no. No postpones yes. Tragic facts don’t exist. The magic of fiction lies in deluding reason that it is fiction. All ways lead to the wayfarer. The long lineage of literature’s shortest form, the aphorism, extends from the mythical Hippocrates of Greek antiquity, through the Renaissance, Erasmus and Paracelsus, into the modern Europe…
The Latest
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Seeing Gray in a Black-and-white World Francine Prose Turns the Screws on the Self-righteous
A Changed Man By Francine Prose HarperCollins, 432 pages, $24.95. ——- You’d think that Francine Prose might be losing some steam. After more than a dozen novels and a handful of short fiction and nonfiction works, it would stand to reason that this National Book Award-nominated author might be a prime candidate for writerly malaise,…
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The Logic of Religious Images
Close to the end of this week’s portion is the injunction (Leviticus 26:1), “You shall not make idols for yourselves.” The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2004) annotates this by referring the reader back to an earlier verse (25:42) on the freeing of Hebrew slaves in the jubilee year, which is required because “they…
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May 13, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Despite the fact that the Russian government is attempting to keep news of this event out of the papers, reports from the city of Zhitomir, about 85 miles from Kiev, indicate that a large-scale pogrom has been taking place over the last five days. Thus far, 16 Jews have been killed…
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A New Novel Tears Down a Sacred Shrine
One of the more surprising moments in recent music history comes midway through the celebrated 1998 indie rock album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” by the band Neutral Milk Hotel. Hiding in otherwise understated tune are some startling lyrics: I know they buried her body with others Her sister and mother and five hundred…
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A Theory of Everything
Franz Rosenzweig is one of the most mentioned and least read of the Jewish philosophers. Everyone with an interest in modern Jewish philosophy includes him in its highest circle, along with Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas and, if religious philosophers are included, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rav Kook and Joseph Soloveitchik. But while even laypeople…
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A Critic Hears False Notes in Music History
One of the liveliest and most remarkable books about music was published this year. In “The Oxford History of Western Music,” iconoclastic University of California, Berkeley, professor Richard Taruskin offers a 4,000-page, six-volume survey of everything there is to know about Western classical music. For one person to encompass the vast range of subject matter…
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Bright Lights, Little Village: Jews in Small-town America
* * *| ‘A baker who can make kimmel bread and German rolls (bagels, too, I suppose) can do well in Kalamazoo,” a field agent for the Industrial Removal Office of the Baron de Hirsch Fund reported in 1907. A junk dealer in Ashland, Ky., he added three years later, would gladly replace the Negro…
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Remembrance Day
Marla sits alone in the sanctuary, her long face dimly illuminated by electric candles set about the room. She has arrived early for the Holocaust Remembrance Day service so as to contemplate private memories of the lost. Not that Marla can remember any specific person slain in the Holocaust, so long before her time, nor…
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