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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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…
The Latest
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September 17, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • Rosa Rosenthal, whose husband managed to disappear after she gave birth, can’t find a job that will allow her to take her newborn with her. With no job, Rosenthal has no money to feed either herself or her baby. Not knowing what else to do, she took out an advertisement to…
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Ladino and Yiddish –– Those Tools of Modernity
Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires By Sarah Abrevaya Stein Indiana University Press, 310 pages, $75 —– I’m thrilled to review this book by Sarah Abrevaya Stein, an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, but not because it is well written. It is unnervingly…
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Fatalism and Humor in Israeli Fiction
Uncle Peretz Takes Off: Short Stories By Yaakov Shabtai Translated From the Hebrew by Dalia Bilu Overlook Duckworth, 239 pages, $24.95. * * *| The Israeli author Yaakov Shabtai, who died in 1981, wrote several morbidly memorable first sentences. “Goldman’s father died on the first of April, whereas Goldman himself committed suicide on the first…
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On the Small Screen, Kitsch and a Witch
That pesky, mysterious Lilith. As the mythical first wife of Adam who, as his equal, refused to lie beneath him, she’s been a source of wonder and inspiration for thousands of years. Demonic references in the Talmud and Kabbalist texts have led many to fear her; more recently, she’s been worshipped as a goddess and…
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The Latest Round of Jewwear
Around three years ago, Jon Polsky and Josh Goldstein thought that T-shirts with Yiddish slogans would be cool. Polsky was recruited to model a “Mensch” shirt, and he willingly wore a navy shirt with an iron-on appliqué, thinking all was well and good. That was until last fall, when Yiddish Ts started cropping up all…
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A Pushcart of Lower East Side Noshes
Can’t afford the lamb at Mirko’s or the seafood at Nick & Toni’s in the Hamptons? For those of us city dwellers, there’s the Noshcart. The Noshcart is a care package that lets you enjoy the kosher delicacies of the Lower East Side at home, “all delivered to you in a unique, reusable miniature pushcart…
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Putting the Fun in Fundamentalism
Born-again Christian youth pastor Shari Putney is standing at the top of a stairway outside a theater in Hollywood, Calif., presiding over a group of young adults, decked out in a sequined, pale-blue mother-of-the-bride dress and a huge diamond cross. Clearly subscribing to the theory that the higher the hair, the closer to God, Putney…
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A Final Rush of Eloquence
Deuteronomy approaches its close this week, and with it Moses, that great leader, who had been so chary of speech in his youth, gathers himself into a final rush of eloquence that is both a full-scale poem or song and a summing up of the story thus far. He delivers it to the entire congregation…
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