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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AAbuzz With Bugs
Swat, squash, slap, smash, smack: Faced with the high whine of flying invaders, teeming masses of tiny creatures or the sickly sheen of hard brown insect shells, we’ll happily whack them, fumigate them, chemical-bomb them, even flash-freeze them. Never mind that we may share a common protean ancestor with the creepy-crawlies, or that we all…
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Remembering the Hebron Riots, 1929
Seventy-five years ago, a two-week orgy of pogroms took place in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Safed, Hebron and a number of smaller locales in British-ruled Palestine, at the end of which 83 Jews had been killed and hundreds wounded. Pogroms are not spontaneous events, and those of August 1929 were no exception. The affair began August…
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Sounding Alarms Without Sounding Alarmist
The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It By Phyllis Chesler Jossey-Bass, 320 pages, $24.95. Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism By Abraham H. Foxman HarperSanFrancisco, 320 pages, $24.95. —— Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism Edited by Ron Rosenbaum Random House Trade Paperbacks, 649…
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Before You Eat, a Little Forshpayz
It was the Romans, those consummate gourmets, who introduced the idea of opening a meal with a selection of small dishes as a way of stimulating the appetite. The word appetizer is derived from the Latin appete, meaning “to desire, covet, or long for”; an appetizer, then, is something that encourages desire — in this…
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Holtzman, Ginsberg and Epstein Back at Bat
For two days in the waning baseball season, the lineup in Cooperstown, N.Y., will feature Holtzman on the mound, Ginsberg behind the plate and Epstein at first base. On August 29 and 30, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, in conjunction with Jewish Major Leaguers, Inc., and the American Jewish Historical Society, will offer a…
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The Search for Reasons and Meanings
The rabbis assumed that the text of the Torah was perfect so that any apparent discrepancy or repetition or contradiction had to be there for a reason. and it was up to us to impute a reason and formulate the lesson that it teaches. They also assumed that each sentence in the Torah had an…
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A Eulogy for New York
Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan By Phillip Lopate Crown Publishers, 422 pages, $25.95. ——– Writers love New York not for what it is, but for what it is in the writer’s imagination. Not even Paris intrigues us the way New York does, which is one of the reasons that the New York writer has become…
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Home is Where the Heart Is: In the South Bronx
Lauding the Met Council’s “mix of government, the good people of the building industry and [the] nonprofit community that cares,” John Ruskay, UJA-Federation of New York executive vice president and CEO, set the tone for the August 10 Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty Builders’ luncheon at Tavern on the Green. Met Council CEO William Rapfogel…
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Adult Education Courses Come to the Small Screen
Adults seeking to bolster their knowledge of Judaism have an alternative to attending adult education classes or slogging through a textbook: They can turn on their videocassette recorders. A number of Jewish courses are now available on videotape — as well as on DVD, compact disc and audiotape — as part of an adult-education series…
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And Justice for All: Curriculum Connects Learning With Action
‘Stephanie Rotsky, World Fixer” reads the sign in Hebrew and English at the entrance to Rotsky’s office at the Rashi School, a Reform Jewish day school outside Boston. It can’t be easy to live up to such great expectations, but Rotsky’s actual job title is perhaps no less daunting: social justice coordinator. Rotsky is the…
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An Israeli Designer Embroiders Fashion and Politics
When Americans think of Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, they’re likely to think of the circle with the colorful fountain. But for Israeli women-in-the-know, Dizengoff is the shopping area to the far north, where boutiques of top-end Israeli designers line the street. And there is comme il faut, a trendy boutique, café and “concept store,”…
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