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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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…
The Latest
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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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How a Chabad Hasid Became a South Bronx Middle School Legend
It’s noontime at Jordan L. Mott Middle School in the South Bronx, and in the playground the tempers are flaring. A seventh-grade girl has discovered that a classmate had posted something about her on Facebook. The expletives are flying, and friends are taking sides. As the crowd grows, the tension thickens. Enter Tuvia Tatik, dean…
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Why the Blood Libel Won’t Die
In “The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe,” Emily Rose, a historian who has taught at Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Baruch, among other universities, explores long-standing false accusations that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in ritual ceremonies. From the Middle Ages to the present,…
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Speaking Yiddish in Gaza
The last time I was in Israel was at the time of one more war in Gaza. People looked anxiously at the sky, scared of the falling debris of Hamas’s mortars. Those who lived closer to the border with Gaza took their deck chairs out to the hills and rooftops every evening. While drinking beer…
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A Miserable Marriage Made Worse by Rabbinic Court That Ended It
I just became a wusband, 36 years of marriage to a Jewess left behind. L. and I called it quits after endless struggles. This was a marriage made in hell, and canceled in a place equally miserable — a beit din, a Jewish religious court. Though she teaches at a Modern Orthodox day school, L….
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Walking the Cobblestones of My Great-Grandparents’ Berlin
I am 35 years old, but until recently, all I knew about my great-grandparents, Carl and Paula Brenner, was one vague, frightening sentence: They lived in Berlin and tried to escape the Nazis but were murdered in the camps. I grew up in Israel, and relocated to the German capital one year ago. Since becoming…
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Music She’s Got License to Shill
(JTA) — You may have never heard of singer-songwriter , but chances are you’ve heard her music. At the moment, McDonald’s is featuring her songs in two commercials — one for frappes, the other for the $2.50 double cheeseburger-and-fries combo. They are the latest in a string of high-profile gigs for Heller, an active member…
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