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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Still Tickling the Ivories at 99 — and Counting
“It’s almost my birthday!” Irving Fields announces, no sooner have I arrived at the doorstep of his Midtown apartment. He gleefully declares that he will be turning “100 years young” in a couple of weeks and then promptly invites us to his birthday party. And so begins my afternoon with Fields, a pianist who has…
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Game Night With Your Cousin A.J. Jacobs
Julie Jacobs, 46, is the sales and business development director at . Her husband, A.J. Jacobs, 46, is a writer of books, one of which is “The Year of Living Biblically.” The two have been living together since 1999 and reside on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with their three sons: Jasper, 11, and…
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Art Miriam Schapiro Married Judaism and Feminism in Her Art
Toronto-born Miriam Schapiro, who died on Saturday, June 20, at the age of 91, proved that an ardent feminist can also be a joyous artist. Born in 1923 to Russian Jewish parents, Fannie Cohen and Theodore Schapiro, she had a rich and varied imagination, as described in Thalia Gouma-Peterson’s “Miriam Schapiro” from Harry N. Abrams…
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A Poor Father Forced to Sell Daughter for $1
100 Years Ago In an office on Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at which farms are usually bought and sold, a poor father from the Bronx came in and sold his 5-year old daughter to a childless couple, Morris and Rebecca Green. The Greens, who emigrated from Odessa, have been married for 12…
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Which Side Were We On? Kentucky Slavery, Mine Wars and Segregation
1. Bat Shit on the Cave Floor In a forest in Kentucky there’s a hole in the ground that was once full of bat shit. The bats are mostly gone now. A bat plague hit here last year, and when you follow the sloping sidewalk down into the hole today, you step into a silent…
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PBS Documentary About Early Palestine Substitutes One Myth For Another
The documentary “1913: Seeds of Conflict,” which airs on June 30 on the Public Broadcasting Service, disputes the idea that Muslims and Jews have always been enemies; it also challenges standard Zionist narratives about Jewish settlement in prestate Israel. Though “1913” is the first major American-Jewish film to take these positions, it is not unique…
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Art Vienna’s Most Jewish Street
Growing up in Vienna means that your primary school education included memorizing the first stanza of the Blue Danube Waltz (“Die Donau so blau, so blau, so blau…”), knowing when the Ottomans unsuccessfully laid siege to Vienna (1529 and 1683), and learning about the city’s best-known boulevard, the Ringstrasse. While I might not recall all…
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Of American Pharaoh, Louis Brandeis and 10 Other Things About (Jewish) Kentucky
1 11,300 Jews live in Kentucky. 2 Henry Hyman was reportedly the first Jew to settle in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1826, he opened a tavern called the Western Coffeehouse, where he sold delicious, non-kosher food and the finest liquor in town. 3 Jewish communal life began in Kentucky in the 1830s. 4 The first Jewish…
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In ‘Alexandrian Summer,’ Their Hearts Belong to Egypt
Alexandrian Summer By Yitzhak Gormezano Goren Translated by Yardenne Greenspan New Vessel Press, 200 pages, $15.99 Late in Israeli writer Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s luminous 1978 novel “Alexandrian Summer,” which has just been published for the first time in English in a fluid translation by Yardenne Greenspan, a tired rabbi watches disapprovingly as a group of…
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Could Israel’s ‘Fauda’ Be Television’s Next ‘Homeland’?
Israeli television has made some major contributions to the global television market in recent years. Shows such as “B’Tipul” and “Hatufim” have achieved worldwide acclaim, either in their original formats or as their Emmy award-winning adaptations, “In Treatment” and “Homeland.” Now, attention has turned toward “Fauda,” the first Israeli political action drama series to bring…
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POEM: Dwelling Amulet (love sonnet to light & psalm 27)
In the beginning I was given everything And what did I do With myself and your treasures? Only one thing I ask Animates my coming and going Inside your house In the beginning, Given inner speech Enfold us within your sanctuary of hands Inside the tent of every wish Encamped, beloved
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Yiddish פֿאַר וואָס הערט מען ניט וועגן דעם גלעצנדיקן וווּקס פֿון דער ישׂראל־בערזע? Why aren’t we hearing about the dramatic growth of the Israeli stock market?
וואָלט דער אָפּרוף געווען אַנדערש, ווען דער ציל פֿון די טעראָריסטן וואָלט ניט געווען ייִדן, נאָר אַן אַנדער גרופּע?
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