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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PSALM 151
What Men Want The talk between them at the table, three pairs of men and women, husbands and wives, was of men and women, husbands and wives, and therefore edgy, so he began his contribution to it cautiously: an anecdote of several years before, he thought perhaps his wife recalled — about the way that…
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A Spider’s-Eye View Of Your Sukkah
From his window perch in the living room of the Shapiro household, Sammy Spider sees fall leaves, scampering squirrels and the family busily erecting a Sukkah. When Sammy — the star of the new story “Sammy Spider’s First Sukkot” (Lerner Pub Group), with text by Sylvia A. Rouss and whimsical cut-paper illustrations by Katherine Janus…
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To Paradise and Back
Simhat Torah follows the seventh day of Sukkot and is a day of rejoicing. On Simhat Torah, the year-long reading of the Torah comes to an end with the last few verses of the Book of Deuteronomy and starts again with the first verses of the Book of Genesis. The scrolls of the Torah are…
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Israel Uncorks World-class Wines
By ordinary standards, the Roman-era grape press found a couple of years ago in the tilled red earth on the outskirts of Kibbutz Netiv HaLamed Heh is not enormously newsworthy. It is just another ruin found in a country in which road workers and homebuilders know that any given square foot of excavation probably could…
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Passion Fruit, Indeed: One Man’s Etrog Obsession
It looks like a lemon, feels like a lemon and kind of smells like a lemon. But an etrog is not a lemon. In fact, it takes a lot to grow an etrog, which is the fruit of the citron tree and one of the four species used on the festival of Sukkot. The others…
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Israeli Expats Explore the Fatherland And Its Lingering Guilt Complex
Roi Talmor, 25, is better known as D.J. Poingi, a break-core (a school of techno) disc jockey who says he comes from IsraHell. He lives in what was East Berlin, in a walk-up he shares with a photographer friend. The apartment is small and unrenovated, a holdout in the hipster neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, where…
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Royal Romance and Medieval Mayhem The History of King Artus
Know that in the days of Uter Pendragon there was a great duke in the Kingdom of Logris called the Duke of Til Tomeil. He had an exceedingly beautiful wife named Lady Izerna. One day King Uter Pendragon ordered a very great tournament for all the knights of Logris by the city of Camelot. Each…
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Memorial Music To Stir the Soul
The arrival on record of an important new work is always welcome, but immense satisfaction is inevitably tinged by sadness with the CD release of John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls,” a 25-minute work honoring the victims of the September 11 attacks. The piece was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and had its…
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Uneasy Reading: Books About Parenting Fall Flat
Newly expecting friends often ask me what pregnancy book they should buy. My answer always has been “none.” Because they are all vile. I suggest my friends sign up for weekly e-mails from babycenter.com instead, and search that superb site for answers to any questions that may come up. As for books, well, chas v’chalila,…
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Manuscripts Worth Millions
If you’re struggling to find a gift for that person who has everything and you’ve got a few hundred thousand dollars to spend, then Sotheby’s New York has the right auction for you. On October 27 and 28, the Montefiore Endowment at Ramsgate, England, will auction off a wide array of rare Hebrew manuscripts that…
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Looking for Doctor; Will Settle for Turkey Sandwich
There are no single men in New York, and everyone knows that. Everyone except my mother. To her, the city is filled with men waiting to make me their wife. I just needed a creative plan for finding them. “If you want to meet a doctor, eat in a hospital,” she advised. Any objections I…
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