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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Yom Kippur
The world is filled with mavens. Diminutive Dr. Ruth is the world’s foremost sex maven. Isaac Mizrahi is a fashion maven. Donald Trump is a business maven. Thomas Friedman is a political maven. And with the recent publication of his timely new book, “On Apology” (Oxford University Press), which is based on the study of…
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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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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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When the Organist Is Episcopalian
In synagogues around the country this month, musical directors will lead congregations in the songs and melodies of the Days of Awe. Like their congregants, they will be moved by the prayers and are likely to feel the electric moments of High Holy Days services. Unlike most congregants, however, they may not be Jewish. “It…
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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…
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