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 Fate of Slaves in Ancient Israel
With this week’s Torah reading, called Mishpatim or “Rules,” the presentation of the laws of ancient Israel formally commences. Earlier sections of the Torah have occasional laws imbedded in them, such as the law of circumcision in Genesis 17 or the laws pertaining to Passover in Exodus 12. But these items are few in number…
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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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Up From Pushkin Street
The Jewish Century By Yuri Slezkine Princeton University Press, 344 pages, $29.95. * * *| Yuri Slezkine begins the fourth chapter of his book, “The Jewish Century,” with a synopsis of Tevye’s daughters, from Sholom Aleichem’s “Tevye the Milkman,” as if it were a parable of all modern Jewish history. “Tsaytl rejected a wealthy suitor…
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Spain’s Other Philosopher- Son Gets Some Recognition
For philosophers, historians and theologians from many faiths, the greatest Spanish Jewish thinker of all time is unquestionably Moses ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides (1138-1204). Hailing from the medieval pueblo of Cordoba, Spain, the prolific Maimonides championed, among other things, the school of religious rationalism. We credit him with writing the first codification of…
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A Boy Grows in Brooklyn
The much-anticipated premiere of Donald Margulies’s “Brooklyn Boy,” which opens at the Biltmore Theater next Thursday as part of Manhattan Theatre Club’s winter season, continues the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s richly comic yet profoundly heart-aching meditation on the meaning of growing up Jewish in America. “I am a second-generation American Jew,” Margulies has declared on a…
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God’s Dream of a Holy Nation
The week’s portion relates two events, a pleasant one between a man and a man, and the one central between the godhead and mankind. There is a charm in reading about an ancient iconic figure in human trouble to which there is a sensible human solution. Father-in-law Jethro tells young Moses he is overdoing it…
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Controversial Priests Tapped for Jerusalem Center
Pope John Paul II has awarded control of an important Catholic cultural center in Jerusalem to a controversial, right-wing priestly order whose founder has been accused of sexual abuse. The order, the Legionaries of Christ, received the administrative keys to the Jerusalem landmark, the Notre Dame Center, in a festive ceremony at the Vatican on…
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Bush Marches Into a Second Term, His Agenda Set by Mideast Foes
Last week, George W. Bush took the oath of office and began his second term. With 150,000 troops still in Iraq, Iran developing nuclear weapons and new leadership in the Palestinian Authority, the Middle East will continue to dominate White House attention. To what extent will Bush’s second term be different from his first? For…
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Ancient Woes Resurfacing As Dean Eyes Top Dem Post
As the Democratic National Committee gets set to pick a new chairman, the party is experiencing déjà vu all over again. Like a replay of the Democrats’ 2004 presidential primary season, the early frontrunner in the DNC race is former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Then as now, a number of other candidates of varying attractiveness…
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Anniversary of Auschwitz Liberation Is Commemorated Around the World
Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz by Russian soldiers, leaders of more than 100 nations joined this week for a string of tributes in America, Europe, and at the death camp itself to honor victims and vow that the Nazi horrors never would be repeated. Hanging over the events, though, was a palpable sense…
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