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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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…
The Latest
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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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A Torah Scholar With a Rock-Star Following
For most scholars, Midrash is an analysis of or commentary on the text of the Bible. But to Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, the literary and Torah scholar with an enormous following on several continents, Midrash is “the repressed unconscious of the Torah.” The difference speaks volumes. Specifically, Zornberg sees Midrash as coming out of what the…
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The Men in My Life
THE WONDERS OF AMERICA As the summer gives way to September, and with it the advent of Rosh Hashanah, my thoughts turn to those who will not be on hand this year to usher in the Jewish New Year: my father-in-law, Yaakov (née Peretz Yaakov) Joselit, and my favorite uncle, Bob (née Baruch) Weissman. Apart…
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Justice, Served: A Tennis Story
The backgrounds of tennis partners Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton were radically different. The daughter of share-croppers, Gibson was born in South Carolina and raised in New York City’s Harlem. British and Jewish, Buxton was the daughter of entertainment impresario Harry Buxton, who made his fortune by breaking the bank at a casino. On and…
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You Spin Me Right ’Round A New Book Laces Into the Marketing of Politics
All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media and the Truth By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan Touchstone, 352 pages, $11.20. * * *| Many people have accused President Bush of misleading the American public. The editors of Spinsanity.com, a nonpartisan Web site “dedicated to debunking political spin and fact-checking the media,”…
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PSALM 151
In his epigraph, poet Merrill Leffler raises William Carlos Williams’s bold claim that men die miserably for lack of what is in poetry. It’s a claim that many practical folks would dismiss on the face of it, for if the news of our world is purely a matter of dollars and sense, then how much…
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Mystery Sells: What the Kabbalah Centre Actually Teaches
The Power of Kabbalah By Yehuda Berg (Jodere Group, 2002) * * *| The 72 Names of God By Yehuda Berg (Kabbalah Centre International, 2003) * * *| Mainstream Jews cannot stand the Kabbalah Centre. You can tell by the way they mock it, highlight its every flaw (huge offices! expensive bracelets!) and deride Madonna,…
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Two New Beginnings and a Sad Ending
“This is my first day on the job,” said Arye Mekel, Israel’s new consul general to New York, at the August 16 preview screening of Margarethe von Trotta’s film, “Rosenstrasse,” at the Center for Jewish History. “The movie is a reflection of [how] human courage can make a significant difference.” “This is [also] my first…
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