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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From ‘The Washington Story’
Jill Wasserstrom, cub reporter for her high school newspaper, the Lane Leader, was a great believer in fate, so it was not surprising that she would read great meaning into the fact that, in November 1982, three historically significant incidents would occur within one 12-hour period. On Wednesday evening, she and Lane Leader editor Wes…
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From ‘Pupik: How My Grandmother Saved My Bellybutton’
We were back at the table. It was Yom Kippur and we were not fasting. I had unintentionally done my share for three weeks in the summer, watching 20 pounds fall away, unable to get anything in or keep anything down. And Grandma needed to eat. Her doctor had set weight gain as a priority…
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From ‘Love is Blond’
If Dolly notices my slightly shaking hand, she is good enough not to mention it. She is as confident as her characters, carrying us both above this atmosphere of uneasiness that I have generated by my being overawed. Pre-empting my questions, she begins to speak. She talks first of her father. “He was always larger…
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From ‘Portions’
Six years you may sow your field and six years may you prune your vineyard Pruning When we came in August, there were roses — budding, half opened, in bloom — and some we had missed in their glory. Their histories lost to us. The future is ours, and so I took up orange-handled shears,…
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From ‘A Graft of Roses’
A synagogue. I had never before visited one, but knew from friends in Prague that the women sat separately, in the balcony. A portly rabbi with a formidable tri-colored beard and a whip-thin cantor stood on the altar, in front of a wooden ark heavily inlaid with metals and carvings. The foreign words of the…
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A Drop in Distinction
‘How to Fall,” the third collection of tales by Edith Pearlman, winner of Sarabande Books’s Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, reads like the literary equivalent of a Broadway salute to established writers, ranging from American stars Cynthia Ozick and Nathan Englander to Israel’s lesser-known, but superb, Yehudit Hendel. To date, small presses have been…
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March 25, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • “Victory!!” screams the Forward’s front page. “Bravo, Hurrah, Cap Makers! Cheers to the entire Jewish quarter, which helped win this amazing battle! Hurrah to all the unions!” It’s a huge holiday for the Cap Makers, for all unions, for the Jewish quarter and for the entire American labor movement. At this…
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Nailing Down a Film’s Legacy
Around this time last year, on the brink of Easter, the humble nail came into its own as a religious symbol. Tiny silver pendants in the shape of railroad spikes were among the many marketing tie-ins produced in connection with Mel Gibson’s cinematic phenomenon, “The Passion of the Christ.” Amid the dueling choruses of consternation…
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The Shtetl Next Door
In my synagogue, the Jewish Center of Princeton, the lobby where mazel tovs drop like manna doubles as an art gallery. Often the art provides a demure backdrop for well-heeled congregants — a still life of lilacs here, a lithograph of the Old City over there. But not The Jewish Shtetl Today, an arresting exhibit…
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The Central Message
Every year at this time in the annual cycle of readings, we are confronted with seemingly endless descriptions of cultic practices, often involving the slaughter of animals, that are for most of us at worst abhorrent and at best — the presentation of bread and cake to God — absurd. Let me try to put…
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A Poet’s Contradictory Properties
For a while now, I have been asking Hasidic Jews, especially women, what they think poetry is supposed to be. In today’s Hasidic world, many view poetry as at worst secular, at best bittul torah, a frivolous distraction from serious learning. The women I’ve spoken to basically agree with this; they consider poetry ornamental or…
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