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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Judaism, Meditation and The B-Word
Mindful Jewish Living: Compassionate Practice By Jonathan P. Slater Aviv Press, 300 pages, $24.95. * * *| Meditation and Judaism: Exploring the Jewish Meditative Paths By DovBer Pinson Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 304 pages, $35. * * *| Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha Edited by Harold Kasimow, John…
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Much Ado About Something
Judy Frankel rushes into the Hillel cafeteria, late to campus as usual after her weekly volunteer work at the AIDS hospice downtown. How good to engage in tikkun olam, repairing the world — keeping patients company during dinner, holding this hand and that, eliciting memories of healthier times. But afterward, she needs the comfort of…
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Generation Birthright Grows Up
The Task of This Translator By Todd Hasak-Lowy Harcourt, 272 pages, $13. * * *| Raymond and Hannah By Stephen Marche Harcourt, 216 pages, $14. * * *| Light Years By Tammar Stein Knopf, 272 pages, $15.95. * * *| There was a time when you hardly ever picked up an American novel or story…
The Latest
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Fathers and Sons
From across the kitchen table, Bobby asks, “You want your firstborn son to die on a battlefield?” “Don’t be ridiculous.” Phil Gutman shakes his head. “We’re talking registration with the Selective Service, that’s all. You’re 18. It’s the law.” “I’ll be drafted to Iraq. We already did the Babylonian exile thing a long time ago,…
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June 3, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • A wild episode occurred this week in Max Solomon’s 19th Street skirt factory, located in New York City. The factory employs 400 workers. One of them, a presser, walked into the boss’s office to ask for his paycheck. When the boss said he didn’t have it, the presser demanded his pay….
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The Man Behind The Equation
Albert Einstein looms over the 20th century. He was undoubtedly the greatest intellect of the past 100 years, a man whose very name is now synonymous with “genius.” His rise to fame began on June 30, 1905, when a German physics journal published a seemingly innocuous article titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” —…
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Finding Comedy in the Conflict
When choreographer David Dorfman toured with his dance company, he often sought out local rabbis to ask, “Who are the chosen people?” After listening to a thoughtful response, Dorfman’s standard follow-up question was, “Does that mean everyone else is un-chosen?” An obsession with questioning belief systems — and a healthy sense of humor — has…
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A Look Back at a Different Book Burning
Exactly 60 years ago, a group of individuals assembled to burn the prayer book of a Jewish leader and to ostracize him from community life. This event occurred not in Europe but in Manhattan, and the book burners were not Nazis. They were Jews. On June 12, 1945, at New York City’s Hotel McAlpin, the…
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May 27, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • With fists flailing, knife-and-ax-bearing mobs attacked the Jewish quarter in Warsaw this week. Now eight Jews are dead and more than 100 are wounded, some grievously. The unusual aspect of this pogrom was that it was entirely Jew-on-Jew action. As part of an effort to clean up the Jewish quarter, members…
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Brown Shirts and Dirndls A New Book Explores the History of Nazis and Fashion
Nazi Chic?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich By Irene Guenther Berg Publishers, 320 pages, $28.95. * * *| Was there an aspect of culture in which the Nazis did not take a fanatical interest? From numerous books and articles and films on the subject, we have become familiar with images of Nazis storming museums…
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A Literary Easterner With a Hollywood Muse
The Golden West: Hollywood Stories By Daniel Fuchs David R. Godine/Black Sparrow Books, 272 pages, $24.95. * * *| In his introduction to “The Golden West,” a new collection of Daniel Fuchs’s writings about California, John Updike places Fuchs in the company of similarly gifted fiction writers who did lucrative stints as screenwriters in Hollywood….
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