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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Al Harei Catskill: The Vacations of Yore
THE WONDERS OF AMERICA Vacations, like women’s fashions, are ever changing. One year, cruises are all the rage; the next, it’s trekking in the Himalayas. Earlier generations were no less impervious to what was in and what was out. As early as the 1920s, increasingly affluent American Jews began to forsake the humble bungalow colonies…
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PSALM 151
Hapax Legomena I covered you and cover you I covet you and uncover you My dream intent to discover you seems clear as a snowflake dresses you and undresses you an orange hand on your breast unless it’s you a purple simple hand on your hand is less than you you covered and recovered you…
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Simple and Delightful: They Don’t All Do That
What is the nature of true love? If there is such a thing, how to understand infidelity? One of the most famously cynical and humane answers is “Cosi Fan Tutte” (“They All Do That”), and it is the last of three operas that Mozart wrote in collaboration with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. In this comedy…
The Latest
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The Beastie Boys Grow Up
The question posed by “To the 5 Boroughs” (Capitol), the sixth album by the Beastie Boys, is: Can irreverence and social-consciousness coexist? As the three rappers push 40 — Adam Yauch, aka MCA, is 39; Mike Diamond, aka Mike D, is 38, and Adam Horovitz, aka Adrock, is 37 — it was perhaps inevitable that…
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Honoring the President’s Mensch
“As a Jew I have found myself becoming angrier and angrier at the current times we face,” declared Kenneth Bialkin, chairman of the board of the America-Israel Friendship League at its July 1 lecture — “Agenda Setting in the Middle East: Media, the Third Party in the Conflict Between the Israelis and the Palestinians”— held…
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July 23, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • More than 5,000 pushcart peddlers filled six halls on the Lower East Side to protest the new decree by Sanitation Commissioner Woodbury. The new law, which takes effect this week, no longer permits pushcart salesmen to stand with their wares in the street and instead forces them to stand under the…
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Buried Leads: A True Story
The purveyors of Jewish history have tended to be highly selective in what they choose to focus on. In America, for example, we almost completely ignore the mercantile achievements of the Sephardic Jews through the ages, as well as their role in the development of modern capitalism. And we rarely talk about Jewish involvement in…
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Unafraid of Sentiment, Never Sentimental
Israeli painter Jan Rauchwerger is a small, reserved man of youthful appearance and countenance, his face round and unlined, his eyes inquisitive, a pale fuzz of hair covering his skull. As his wife, etcher Galit Rauch- werger, and two teenage boys move around his Jaffa house, he seems to take it all in through an…
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Good Dog! A Summer Taste Test
There’s no way to know this for sure, but I would suggest that kosher frankfurters first entered the wider American consciousness in the 1970s, thanks to, of all things, a TV commercial. In this commercial — for those of you who threw out your televisions in the 1960s — a man dressed as Uncle Sam…
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The Dark Patches of Your Life
Let’s start by taking some questions that any of you might have… (silence). Anyone?… (more silence). Okay, I’ll start. Let’s say I had this friend who had a tough week. And he/she was feeling a little down on him/herself. Is there anything in this week’s Torah portion, Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22, that might encourage me — I…
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Shemer Zemer Added to Tisha B’Av Liturgy
For many Israelis and American Jews, the recently deceased singer-songwriter Naomi Shemer always has been a religious figure of sorts, with an unmatched ability to move even the most secular listener with her spiritually uplifting songs about Israel and Zionism. Now Shemer’s status as a modern-day psalmist is official: Her most famous song, “Jerusalem of…
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