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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Showing ‘Spirit,’ Going Red and Taking Time for Israel
“Most of us who have passed the 60-year mark are living proof of the advances made in medical research,” said Texas’s former governor, Ann Richards, at the May 4 “Spirit of Achievement” luncheon of the National Women’s Division of Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Richards praised the college for its “pioneering research…
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Locks of Love
Throughout the term of his vow as Nazirite, no razor shall touch his head; it shall remain consecrated until the completion of his term as Nazirite of the Lord, the hair of his head being left to grow untrimmed. (Numbers 6:5) Before my 9-year-old-daughter, Anna, was conceived, I was filled with a biblical longing to…
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Out of Africa
The Persistence of Memory By Tony Eprile Norton, 288 pages, $24.95. —— ‘You know a country is in trouble when its Jews start leaving,” remarks a character in Tony Eprile’s new novel, “The Persistence of Memory.” “We are like the miner’s parakeet, and we are all going… to Australia, Canada, Israel, you name it.” The…
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Resurrecting Modigliani’s Bar Mitzvah
‘I went through graduate school never hearing his name,” recalled Mason Klein, the curator of “Modigliani: Beyond the Myth,” a show of some 100 works by the original peintre maudit, which opened at New York’s Jewish Museum. The installation of the city’s first major Modigliani exhibition in more than 50 years was in full swing…
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Following Another Through Grief
At several points in the novel “A Song I Knew by Heart,” author Bret Lott refers to a character straining under the sheer effort of putting a feeling into a few words — “the work of it,” he writes. The story, which is a modern retelling of the biblical Ruth and Naomi narrative, might as…
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The Cheese Factor
If you are anything like me, then come late springtime, when Shavuot rolls around, your mind turns to thoughts of cheesecake. (Of course, if you’re really like me, then you’re thinking about cheesecake, on and off, pretty much all year long.) This is an extremely pleasant line of thought, but it is hardly a novel…
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Modern-day Ruths
It is not an easy road — the road from Moab to Bethlehem, from the non-Jewish world into the Jewish. For all the excitement and joy of starting a new life in the Jewish community, there is also, by definition, much new material to be learned and always something to be left behind. Ruth, whose…
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A First Lady, a Good Cause and a Comedic King
While Leona Helmsley, Edgar Bronfman Jr. and [Court TV Network CEO] Henry Schleiff wended their way into the inner sanctum of the Four Seasons, its bar area pulsed with a crush of photographers and guests who had come for the April 27 book party for Tina Santi Flaherty’s “What Jackie Taught Us — Lessons From…
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A Letter Home From Kadesh-Barnea
Dear Sister, For a while, it was what we’d imagined when we first heard Miriam’s call. Out of the city for song and worship! As I write I wonder, now that Pharaoh is dead, how you fare back home. I wonder if I left in vain. Perhaps you celebrate a time of hope and renewal….
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May 21, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • In a driving rain, at 3 a.m., the Aksel family was evicted from their apartment on 89 Columbia Street. Mr. Aksel, a tailor, only learned of the eviction after a long day of toiling in the shop. When he arrived home, he didn’t know that he, his wife and their three…
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It’s All Greek to Them
The Kehila Kedosha Janina synagogue has survived for years in relative obscurity, much like the distinct community of Jews that worships there. Located at 280 Broome Street on New York’s Lower East Side, the historic two-story gem is the only synagogue of Romaniote Jews in the Western Hemisphere, and it has the sparse attendance to…
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