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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We Bought an Average Farm in New Jersey. Or So We Thought.
We were having our Shabbat dinner at “the farm” when, after finishing the chicken soup with lockshen, the poultry dish arrived. My sister Lenore stabbed what she thought was the weekly roast chicken and screamed out, “Henrietta!” Henrietta was our pet duck. Ours was not a working New Jersey farm, but a summer vacation spot…
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Art Crossing Borders in Palestinian Contemporary Art
The Umm el-Fahem Gallery, dedicated to exhibiting contemporary Palestinian and Arab art, contains an archive seemingly at odds with its mission. It features the photographs and life histories of some 300 of the town’s oldest inhabitants, most of them already dead. But these stories were sacred to the Gallery’s founder and director, Said Abu Shakra,…
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Rediscovering the Judeo-Spanish Language
Born in Paris in 1950, Dominique Vidal is a French author and journalist specializing in the Middle East, the Holocaust, far-right-wing European politics and related issues. A contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, he has co-written “The New A-Z of the Middle East,” among other books. He is the son of Haïm Vidal Sephiha, a Judeo-Spanish…
The Latest
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How I Gained an Unlikely Love for Torah — And a Guatemalan Daughter
I never planned on becoming a Torah study regular, and the last thing I expected was that attending Torah study would lead me to adopt an “unaccompanied minor” from Guatemala. Yet that’s what happened. While many Americans are moving away from religious affiliation, my increased connection to Judaism through weekly Torah study has strengthened my…
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Music The Secret Jewish History of James Taylor
This past June, James Taylor finally achieved a feat that had eluded the folk-pop singer-songwriter for the past 45 years or so: His new album, “Before This World,” shot to No. 1 in its first week of release. The last time the folk-rock singer-songwriter approached the top of Billboard’s album charts was in 1971 when…
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POEM: ALIBI
This past week, news of a stabbing attack on marchers in Jerusalem’s Gay Pride parade, which left 16-year-old Shira Banki dead, and an arson attack that killed Palestinian toddler Ali Dawabsha, circulated through news and social media channels in Israel and abroad. The following poem by the Israeli poet Eli Eliahu appeared on his public…
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This Family Loves Basketball, Shabbat and Stephen Colbert
As of July, Ron Fish, 46, is the new senior rabbi of Temple Israel in Sharon, Massachusetts. His wife, Leah Bieler, 43, is a Jewish educator and Talmud scholar and carried on the couple’s love for music when she served as Fish’s cantor at their former synagogue. The two recently moved to Sharon with their…
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Doris Salcedo’s Colombian Exposition
Throughout her career, the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has devoted herself to exploring and quietly uncovering lethally efficient acts of human cruelty. Her sculptures and public installations, which she terms “interventions,” confront instances of violence and oppression, legacies of injustices and historical perpetrations. They excavate what has been repressed and buried, and dig up what…
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Ab Cahan Meets an Anti-Semite in Poland
100 Years Ago Reporting from Poland, Abraham Cahan writes how an otherwise intelligent hotelkeeper in Kalisz mistook him for an American Christian. As a result, the hotelkeeper spoke openly regarding Poland’s Jewish minority to someone she didn’t know was Jewish. The conversation started after Cahan mentioned the large numbers of poor Jews on the streets….
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Art Indiana Jones and the Temple of Jews
Museums don’t typically take public, unequivocal stands on the question of the literal truth of the bible. But a National Geographic announcement of its exhibit “Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology” (on display through Jan. 3, 2016) refers to both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail as “famous, fictional relics.” But…
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Film & TV David Foster Wallace Wouldn’t Approve Of Me Loving This Movie. Too Bad.
Let’s get this out of the way — I never finished “Infinite Jest. “ (As a friend recently put it, “Has anyone really?” ) In fact, any guy who listed the book among his favorites was automatically flagged as untrustworthy on my OkCupid scale of dateability. But it seems that some humans have made it…
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