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 ‘Kosher Bachelor’ Finds Fun at Food Fest
When I first approached Shuli Madmone’s table at Kosherfest, he took one look at my press badge and said, “Have I got a story for you.” Madmone is a second-generation spice retailer whose parents had a retail operation in Israel. His company, WholeSpice.com, sells whole and freshly ground spices with a slightly up-market bent. But…
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Who Is a Jewish Traitor?
In this politically heated season, some Jews are eager to label others Jews, including political leaders, as traitors; many more refuse to think in these terms altogether, finding the entire exercise distasteful. But we can’t afford either this rush to judgment or such easy dismissal of the challenge. Traitors endanger the core commitments by which…
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An American Journalist’s Hasidic Tale
The Rabbi of 84th Street: The Extraordinary Life of Haskel Besser By Warren Kozak HarperCollins, 200 pages, $24.95. * * *| Since the era of the Baal Shem Tov and the first Hasidic leaders, one of the primary attractions of Hasidism as a movement has been the Hasidic story. A little shaggy-dog — a bit…
The Latest
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Beef Goy Ish Ah Kupp, And Other Gems
Just the other day, I picked up a copy of a cookbook that I had not seen since I was a child; back then, it occupied pride of place in my mother’s kitchen. As I held “The Chinese-Kosher Cookbook” in my hand and made my way through its recipes for Pineapple Chicken Fay Gel Lah…
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A Tale From Japan
“An Intimate Evening” to benefit The Neuropathy Association was held October 18 at Le Cirque. This potentially crippling and often misdiagnosed disorder “afflicts close to 20 million Americans and an estimated 300,000 New Yorkers” said TV anchor Chuck Scarborough, who shared the evening’s emcee spot with Pia Lindstrom, daughter of Ingrid Bergman. “It is true…
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Odd Man Out
He was strong and handsome, and he was the first born; but his mother, indifferent to all that, preferred his brother and viewed him, largely, as a dullard. When she talked with his brother, their conversations were so darting and subtle that his head hurt. He could not follow them and came to think that…
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Spiritual Hunger Artists
Joy Comes in the Morning By Jonathan Rosen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages, $25. —— Jonathan Rosen came to wide public attention, first as the editor (for some 10 years) of this newspaper’s highly regarded Arts & Letters section, and then as the author of “Eve’s Apple” (Random House Inc., l997), an impressive debut…
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Bridging a Rift Between Israelis and Americans
Outside a velvet rope on a recent fall evening last month, three dark-haired men tossed their cigarettes, passed a security check and queued up to pay a cover charge. They were chatting in Hebrew about a hot new software program as they entered the club, where a celebrity D.J. dubbed “Van Jee” was spinning tunes…
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A Jewish Doctor Who Put Nazis on the Couch
In 1946, Dr. Leon Goldensohn, a Jewish psychiatrist from Newark, N.J., spent six months conducting lengthy interviews with dozens of Nazis during the Nuremberg trials. Unfortunately, he died before he could write a book about the experience. But now, nearly 60 years after the trials, thanks to his brother, Goldensohn’s copious and detailed notes are…
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Honoring the Present –– and Future –– Nobel Laureates
“It’s the first time Israelis have been awarded a Nobel Prize in Science” said Ben Sosewitz, chairman of Technion International’s board of governors, at the October 14 American Technion Society 80th anniversary dinner at The Plaza in New York. While applauding Technion professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover — discoverers of ubiquitin, which is a…
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Rebecca at the Well
Abraham’s servant Eliezer, at the well outside Nahor, is looking for a wife for Isaac, and he asks the Lord, in Genesis 24:14, for a sign: “Let the maiden to whom I shall say, ‘Pray let down your jar that I may drink,’ and who shall say, ‘Drink, and I will water your camels’ —…
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