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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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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From The Angel of Forgetfulness by Steve Stern
Last summer, the Forward dipped its toes into the world of fiction by co-sponsoring a monthly literary series in New York called “Novel Jews.” The series has become an enormous success, with one drawback: It is not available to the majority of our readers, who live outside New York. In an effort to include them,…
The Latest
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Plaut Redux: Reforming the Reform Commentary
Since its release nearly a quarter-century ago, the Reform movement’s first biblical commentary has sold 250,000 copies and helped fuel a revolution in Torah study. But, as more and more congregations in recent years began placing a greater emphasis on Hebrew and Torah reading during Sabbath services, the tome essentially fell out of step with…
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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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Orthodox Union Sets Ban on Clubs For Scotch Tipplers
The Orthodox Union has called on its member congregations to eliminate from their synagogues the informal drinking circles known as Kiddush Clubs. In letters addressed to member rabbis, the O.U., which represents some 1,000 congregations, has encouraged synagogues to devote the Sabbath of February 5 to launching a Kiddush Club crackdown. The move comes as…
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Young Activists Join Economic Lions at Davos Parley
Greenspan, Friedman, Fischer, Reich, Rubin, Stiglitz, Summers, Wolfensohn: For years, the single-name figures of the economic world have been men, many of them Jewish, almost all of them weighing in on issues of globalization and economic development from university chairs, institutional headquarters or government departments. But faced with the alarmingly real problems of 3.7 billion…
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January 28, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Word from St. Petersburg indicates that a full-fledged revolution has finally broken out in Russia. It is being reported that strikers protesting in front of the tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg were brutally attacked by the Imperial Army, leaving over 2,000 dead and over 5,000 wounded, many of them women…
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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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