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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Blowing the Shofar in Cairo
‘Have you ever prepared a Jewish body for burial?” It was Saturday morning, April 13, 2013. The person on the line had called me hours earlier to let me know that Carmen Weinstein, leader of Cairo’s Jewish community, had died. I had arrived in Cairo nearly eight months earlier to work at the U.S. Embassy,…
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Music How Michael Alpert Brought Klezmer Into the 21st Century
The scent of herring; owlish spectacles; dusty, tragedy-laden archives; scratchy vinyl records you wouldn’t want your friends to know about — these are the things one sometimes associates with Yiddish culture. For more than three decades, Michael Alpert has worked hard on preserving and reviving an Eastern European Jewish tradition that is precisely the opposite…
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Music Soundtrack of Our Spirit: The Podcast
Readers have been calling and emailing us, asking for a podcast version of our playlist so they can listen to it in yet more situations — even on those infrequent occasions when they can’t stream the playlist from here. So we heard you and put together a single podcast with our top five songs and…
The Latest
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Patrick Stewart Bluntly Channels a Jewish Writer’s Sensibility
I don’t know if “Blunt Talk,” the new comedy on Starz starring Patrick Stewart as a disaster-prone news anchor, is any good. But I do know that I like it. The show is strange and manic, and has a lot of witty lines about the Falklands War. It also has weak dialogue and contrived plot…
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Books ‘Eating Delancey’ — and Enjoying Every Morsel
— what a super name for a book. I’ve had this relatively new volume by Aaron Rezny and Jordan Schaps on my desk for a little while now, and I keep dipping back into it because it’s so rich in delicious tidbits about the Jewish foodways of New York’s Lower East Side. It’s kind of…
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Film & TV Theo Bikel Sang ‘Hava Nagila’ During a Hijacking, And Other Stories From Sue Mengers’ Epic Life
Did you cry during “Love Story”? Sing along to “Funny Girl”? Swoon over “The Way We Were”? For that, and a lot more, you can thank Sue Mengers. Before this badass lady came along, talent agents were basically baby-sitters to the stars: you tried to keep them in line, and if that failed, you prayed…
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Jonathan Franzen’s Moral Hazard
Purity By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $28 In 1969, after having written two earnestly serious novels that scrutinized the morality of his times in stately elegant prose, Philip Roth wrote “Portnoy’s Complaint.” A bawdy riff on sex and the impossibility of living up to the expectations of overbearing mothers, it reads…
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Three’s Company on the Upper East Side
'Personally, I love preparing for Friday night dinner,' said novelist Nicole Dweck.
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A Letter From the Editor: Efsharoot/Possibility
You may be familiar with the journal Sh’ma, first published in 1970 by the liberal theologian Eugene Borowitz and in continuous publication ever since. You may be surprised to find this Sh’ma insert in the Forward. In surprise, we hope you will find possibility. What you hold in your hand is a link between Sh’ma’s…
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Half Meritorious and Half Culpable: A Sh’ma Infographic
Every person must view himself all year long as though he is half meritorious and half culpable, and also the entire world is half meritorious and half culpable. [Therefore,] if he commits one single sin, he will have tilted himself and the entire world to the side of culpability, and cause them destruction. But if…
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Consider and Converse: A Sh’ma Guide for the High Holidays
Sh’ma curates conversations on a single theme rooted in Jewish tradition and the contemporary moment. At the heart of this issue of Sh’ma is the theme of possibility. The perspectives shared in these pages are meant to be expansive — to inspire reflections on Judaism and possibility in ways you may not have considered before….
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