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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Lost for a Century, the Minhogimbukh Returns
There was once an Eastern European tradition to cook chicken livers on Rosh Hashanah because their name in Yiddish, leberlakh, sounds like the injunction “leb ehrlikh,” to “live honestly.” In fact, there were loads of other customs worldwide — some communities shunned vinegar while celebrating the New Year, because of its sour taste, while still…
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Rosh Hashanah
A couple of months ago, I joined in a moment of mass ridicule. The occasion was a front-page article in The New York Times about ultra-Orthodox women burning $2,000 wigs because the hair had been traced to idolatrous Hindu rites. How peculiar, we thought. The deeper peculiarity, however, was not my reaction to wigs and…
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Living a ‘Hineini’ Life
My father was justly famous — or infamous — for his rendition of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. Every year at Rosh Hashanah, he’d chant the Torah portion with all the terrifying drama of a camp counselor telling a ghost story. He’d do different voices for God (booming) Isaac (tentative and terrified) and Abraham…
The Latest
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Seders on Rosh Hashanah? A Calcutta Story
If you’ve never heard of a Rosh Hashanah Seder, you aren’t alone, but Rahel Musleah is trying to change that. The tradition, which Musleah summarizes in her new children’s book, “Apples and Pomegranates: A Rosh Hashanah Seder” (Kar-Ben), with illustrations by Judy Jarrett, comes from her native India, where it was long practiced by the…
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For Once in Your Life, Go Ahead: Make a Tsimmes!
Though it is mostly derived from German and the Slavic languages, Yiddish is written in Hebrew characters, which are notoriously tricky to transliterate into English. As evidence, we need cite but a couple of examples: the disputable bubbe-mayseh (bobeh-myseh? bube-maiseh? there is no end to the tale) and the unfortunate nebbish (which could, poor thing,…
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Reuniting Refugees Upstate
“I’ve just come back from the 60th reunion of the “Oswego Refugees,” an excited 93-year-old Ruth Gruber told me on the phone. Gruber (foreign correspondent, photographer, author of 14 books) was referring to the August 4-6 weekend at Oswego, N.Y., at which 38 of the nearly 1,000 refugees she shepherded August 4, 1944, to “Fort…
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The Choice We Confront
If I were asked to recite the Torah while standing on one leg, I would repeat the summary formulation to be found at the end of this week’s portion, Nitzavim/VaYelekh. While standing on one leg, I would say — conflating Deuteronomy 30:15 and 30:19 — that the essence of the Torah is this, in the…
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September 10, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • The judges in Galicia have a strange sense of justice. When a Jew and a gentile stood before a judge in a Galician shtetl and were found guilty of the same charge, disturbing the peace, the judge meted out two different sentences. The gentile received a fine of five kroner and…
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Sabra Madonna: Meet Israel’s Pop Diva
Sarit Hadad is focused on the wide screen in front of her, looking intently at the final production of her music video for “Rak Ata” (“Only You”). She has just returned from Romania, where the fast-paced, high-drama clip was shot. “This is MTV material,” declares one of her staff at the conclusion of the clip….
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Ozick Returns, Still Aflush With Ideas
Heir to the Glimmering World By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin, 310 pages, $25. * * *| Cynthia Ozick, the fiercely and fearsomely intelligent critic and novelist, has based her latest work of fiction on Winnie-the-Pooh. More precisely, the new book is inspired by the story of Christopher Robin Milne (1920-1996), whose father, A.A. Milne, wrote…
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Letting Loose the Golem on Society’s Dilemmas
It’s rare to come upon a book with a truly original idea — which makes it all the more important that the idea be clearly and convincingly argued. Take this book about the golem — not just Rabbi Loew’s famous clay warrior of Prague, but any created being, somewhere between human and inanimate, brought into…
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