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 Old Master Of Tel Aviv
When you are at the top of your profession, enjoy an international reputation in the art world and have achieved financial success and critical acclaim, what do you do for an encore? That’s the question that faces Menashe Kadishman, arguably Israel’s most brilliant artistic export. His works can be found in New York’s Metropolitan Museum…
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Storytelling as Both Sacred and Sacrilegious
The Seventh Beggar By Pearl Abraham Riverhead, 355 pages, $25.95. —– Twenty-five years ago, thinking it a mitzvah to comfort a Soviet Jewish refusenik, I came, bearing books, to a Moscow apartment. During the time that its tenant — who had lost his job after applying to emigrate from Moscow to Israel — had spent…
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A Call to Liberals To Take Back the Light
‘The separation of Church and State does not mean the segregation of religion from the public discourse,” Evangelical Christian Minister Jim Wallis said in a recent interview with the Forward. Wallis –– who lives in Washington, D.C., with his sons and wife, the Rev. Joy Carroll (the first woman to be ordained in the Church…
The Latest
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The Transformative Tale of ‘GI Jews’
GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation By Deborah Dash Moore Harvard University Press, 368 pages, $25.95. * * *| Contemporary Jewish thought has been shaped by the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel and the transformation of the American Jewish community from a distant, peripheral outpost into the hub of…
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Torah Couture
Walking around the classroom, Rabbi Katz returns the weekly homework assignments, stops at Shira’s desk. “Shira, you know our assignments are to summarize each Torah portion, but you copied every single word.” “Details are important,” she says, looking at her returned homework. “A ‘C’? You’re giving me a ‘C’?” Rabbi Katz reminds himself to be…
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February 11, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • A telegram arrived this week from members of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia describing events over there. Part of it read, “At the behest of the Bund’s Central Committee, massive strikes have broken out in all regions where the Bund is active: in Vilna, Bialystok, Kovno, Dvinsk, Pinsk, Mohilev, Berditshev,…
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The Cold War’s Strangest Bedfellows How Romania Sold Its Jews to Israel, and What It Got in Return
The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of The Extraordinary Secret Bargain Between Romania and Israel By Radu Ioanid Ivan R. Dee, 254 pages, $26. * * *| Surely the Cold War never produced stranger bedfellows than Shaike Dan and General Ghe- orghe Marcu. Dan, a Jew from Bessarabia, parachuted into Romania at the close…
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Papa Was a Rolling Stone How One Young Woman Pieced Together Her Father’s Story
Assembling My Father By Anna Cypra Oliver Houghton Mifflin, 368 pages, $25. * * *| The old chestnut about 1960s hedonism ran that if you remembered the decade, you weren’t really there. If the joke once reflected a popular perception of the times, it also missed a much more unpleasant truth. Released from social conventions,…
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For Women, Middle Ages Might Have Been Golden
Eight hundred years ago, thousands of Jewish Egyptian women refused to immerse in the ritual bath. Only Maimonides’s threat that they would lose their Ketubah money quelled the orchestrated rebellion, years after it began. A century later in Ashkenaz (Christian Europe), rabbis were astonished by the large number of Jewish women who refused to have…
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An Israeli Photographer Finds Holiness at the Rave
In a whirl of light and color, Tomer Ganihar believes he has photographed holiness. And for this Israeli photographer, it lives at the rave. “In the clubs, holiness is everywhere.” Ganihar said. “It’s like a temple. The clubs are the new synagogues, and the DJs are the rabbis.” Using long exposures and only a simple…
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Dwelling Among Them
After the action-packed stories of the first one-and-a-half books of the Torah — all of Genesis and the first part of Exodus — the main narrative abruptly changes course in the middle of the book of Exodus. Stories such as the creation of the world, the flood, the lives of the patriarchs, the slavery in…
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