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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Anne Frank Forever
Anne Frank died in 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. June 12, 2004, would have been her 75th birthday. When I first read Anne Frank’s diary I was not yet 13 years old. Jewish tradition dictated that I was on the verge of adulthood, but I knew I had a long way to…
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The Stressful, Dreary Life With a Very Small Stranger
Why is it so dang hard for women to tell the truth about new motherhood? Sure, there’s nothing like a fragrant-headed, milk-drunk baby draped over your shoulder like lichen. But when newborns are not happily gorked to the gills, they have two modes: screaming and boring. They are far less interactive than Super Nintendo. Early…
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Does Modern Orthodoxy Have a Future?
Orthodoxy Awakens: The Belkin Era and Yeshiva University By Victor B. Geller Urim Publications, 295 pages, $26.95. * * *| An American Orthodox Dreamer: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Boston’s Maimonides School By Seth Farber Brandeis University Press, 228 pages, $34.95. * * *| Even in the midst of unprecedented growth of its institutions, Modern…
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Preserving the Musical Legacy of Those Silenced
Honoring the dead always has been a complicated affair, made all the more difficult when the fallen are victims rather than heroes. Physical monuments engender the most debate, probably because they are, in theory, permanent. Musical tributes have produced less anguish. This may be because they don’t elicit much notice, or people think such efforts…
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California Dreaming: When Boundaries Are Emotional
The year is 1979, and eighth grader Jill Wasserstrom lives in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood. A budding leftist, she spends Friday nights eagerly preparing to defend the Ayatollah Khomeini in her social studies class, or writing a subversive bat mitzvah speech that proclaims the Torah an “outdated, mythological document.” Meanwhile, her older sister, Michelle,…
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A Bad Precedent
Two men, Moses and Aaron, stand on a hill outside Kadesh in the Negev. Moses is bent with the weight of responsibility and knowledge. They look northward toward Canaan. Moses: I’m telling you, this time He’s really angry. Aaron: What else is new? About what this time? Moses: The spies. Aaron: He sent them. Moses:…
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Notes on Camp
The buzzword in Jewish circles these days is “continuity”: What turns Jewish children into actively Jewish adults? Sociologists usually point to parents and schools as the two prime agents of socialization. And yet, in the Jewish community, these agents don’t seem to be doing their jobs. A report released last month by the National Study…
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The New New-world Voice
Twenty-seven years ago, Irving Howe offered a sad prediction — now labeled by literary scholars the “Howe Doctrine” — about the fate of Jewish American creative expression. In the Kaddish-like introduction to his 1977 anthology of Jewish American short stories, Howe argued that “the post-immigrant Jewish experience” was exhausted, “its usability for the making of…
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An Enchanting Lesson
It was a disconcerting thought, a wake-up call that interrupted my reverie as I thought fondly back on four years of teaching second-grade Hebrew school. I realized with a start that the students I’d taught my first year were becoming bar and bat mitzvah this year. They had learned the trope, the system of diacritical…
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PSALM 151
“Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.” So wrote Basho, the great 17th-century haiku master. The master meant that poetry need not be useful in any obvious sense. On the other hand, who needs a poem about snow in the middle of winter? Far better to have one now, when temperatures…
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… And the Most Important
June is upon us and with it, wedding preparations are in full swing: last minute fittings; anxious consultations with the clergy or other officiants; continual emendations to the seating chart; and, perhaps most significantly, a seemingly endless stream of conversations with the caterer — arguably the person of the hour. When it comes to staging…
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