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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Painterly and Scholarly: Archie Rand Satisfies Purists of All Kinds
Archie Rand’s challenging, hybrid artwork has long been difficult to categorize. As a progressive painter who frequently incorporates Jewish themes and sacred texts into his canvases, Rand has faced criticism from purists in both the religious and avant-garde communities. His work, however, is probably best understood as a series of paintings that consistently make use…
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This Tale of Mystery Begins With a Corpse –– But Ends With a Twist
Lev Raphael’s latest novel, “The German Money,” is a Book Sense 76 pick. The Outcast Dove By Sharan Newman Forge, 429 pp, $25.95. —- In mysteries it’s a cliché to introduce a corpse on the first page. In her new book, Sharan Newman seems to drearily fulfill that expectation, offering us a dead body in…
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Doing It for Themselves: Synagogue Sisterhoods Come Into the Future
At synagogues across the country, the women who have been filling the ranks of sisterhoods and doing the bulk of volunteering have been looking behind themselves and seeing… no one. These older women have raised millions of dollars and organized countless events. Yet the younger women around them, even those who attend services regularly, simply…
The Latest
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A Mega Bar Mitzvah for Actor Fyvush Finkel
The June 21 tribute to Yiddish-English stage, film and TV star Fyvush Finkel — hosted by The Yiddish Artists & Friends Actors Club and The Yiddish Theatrical Alliance at the Lincoln Square Synagogue — was akin to a mega bar mitzvah. As the 350 guests mingled, noshed and wished 81-year-old Finkel nor oyf simkhas (“only…
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Religion in the New World
in an intensive manner that was unknown to their parents earlier in the century. The Havurah movement of the 1960s and 1970s was a positive response to these developments, and the appearance of what is today called “Jewish renewal” owes its origins to those years. The Reconstructionist movement opened the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1969,…
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Settling in Transjordan
Imagine yourself as the director of a play or film with Numbers 32 as your script. What instructions do you give to the actors playing the men of the tribes of Reuven and Gad as they rehearse the scene in which they inform Moses of their desire to settle in Transjordan, short of the final…
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False Messiahs and Whirling Dervishes: A Scholar’s Fresh Take on an Old Topic
The Sabbatean Prophets By Matt Goldish Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $39.95. ——- The following dire, revolutionary proclamation issues forth from a charismatic provocateur in Gaza: “None will be saved from these tribulations except those dwelling in this place. The [very] name of the place [connoting strength] expresses her nature. And with the advent of…
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At 80, Lang Still Keeps the Flame Alive
Guests savored paprika chicken, dumplings, duck liver plus 80 cakes at the June 15 surprise 80th birthday party for George Lang thrown by his wife, Jennifer, daughter Gigi and son Simon. Held at the La Palestra gym — next door to the Café des Artistes, which Lang owns — there was room for Hungarian folk…
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New Look at False Messiah
well before Shabbetai Zevi’s total defection from Judaism. That latter catastrophe led to the deeper, antinomian apostasy of the later Jewish Sabbateans, as well as to the Donmeh, the school of Muslim believers in Shabbetai Zevi, which persists, very secretly, in Turkey today. Even in contemporary America, though limited to rather marginal Jewish circles, the…
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July 9, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • Tragic news has arrived from Europe announcing the death of the leader of political Zionism, Dr. Theodore Herzl, from a heart attack. He was 44 years old. Herzl’s death is a terrible blow not only for Zionism, but also for millions of Jews who looked to him as a savior of…
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They Might Be Giants
In Our Hearts We Were Giants By Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev Carroll & Graf, 305 pages, $25. —- Imagine the terror of a having a vicious German Shepherd bark at you on the train platform at Auschwitz. Now imagine that the dog is barking at you as your tiny body is lifted from a…
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Yiddish עכטע חסידישע מעשׂיות, איבערגעזעצטע אױף פּױלישAuthentic Hasidic tales, translated into Polish
די אַנטאָלאָגיע ווערט באַגלייט מיט פֿילמעלעך, וווּ באַקאַנטע פּוילישע פּערזענלעכקײטן לײענען אָדער דערצײלן איבער די מעשׂיות.
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Film & TV He saved dozens of kids in Auschwitz — he kept it a secret for nearly the rest of his life
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Looking Forward I’m probably going to be on the government’s list of Jews at UPenn
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