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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How To Navigate the Federal Bar Mitzvah Exchange Marketplace
Welcome to the federal bar/bat mitzvah marketplace, where we will make sure that your child gets the ritual adulthood celebration that he or she deserves. Please note that every American Jewish child aged 13 must receive a bar/bat mitzvah or else the family will face a severe financial penalty that even the savviest accountant won’t…
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Kevin Pollak Talks Comedy, Misery and Twitter Outrage
Kevin Pollak made his comedic debut a little more than 47 years ago, when his mother came home unexpectedly and caught him lip-syncing a bit about Noah and God from Bill Cosby’s first album. Her reaction: “You’ve got to do that for the Zuckers at Passover.” There were about 40 family and friends in attendance,…
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HomeLands: Nesting in Nashville
In this inaugural feature, the Forward interviewed Rabbi Aaron Finkelstein, 31, and his wife, Julie Sugar, 30, at their home in Nashville, Tennessee. They moved there from New York so that Aaron could work at Congregation Sherith Israel and the Akiva School. Julie is a scriptwriter for an educational online program called YiddishPOP and also…
The Latest
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Books Say Goodbye to This Treasure Trove of Rare Texts — Until 2018
The greatest collection of rare Jewish historical documents in the United States will be boxed up later this year and put into storage until at least 2018, the Forward has learned. The library at Manhattan’s Jewish Theological Seminary — Conservative Judaism’s largest rabbinic seminary — holds the most impressive compilation of Jewish historical materials outside…
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Chilly Scenes of Cleveland Synagogues
● Congregation By Raphael Silver AuthorHouse, 412 pages, $23.95 Over the course of his 83 years, Raphael Silver was many things: real estate developer; film producer, director, writer and distributor; climber of Mount Kilimanjaro at age 73; indefatigable collector of objects; and finally, at the end of his life, author of a novel, “Congregation.” Silver…
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10 Things About (Jewish) Arizona
1) 106,300 Jews live in Arizona. 2) Arizona’s first known Jewish resident was Dr. Herman Bendell who, in 1870, was nominated to be the state’s first Superintendent of Indian Affairs. 3) Since there were few women in the Arizona territory, early Jewish settlers traveled elsewhere to find wives. In 1884, 21 of these brides founded…
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Music At 50, Israel Museum Looks to Local Artists
Mira Lapidot, 44, has risen through the ranks of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, starting her career 16 years ago as a guide and, in the past three years, serving as chief curator of the fine arts wing. Yet at that moment of personal achievement she and her team were already planning what they knew…
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The Art of Laurie Simmons Directly Challenges the Viewer
First I notice each model’s eyebrows. They are fluffy and coiffed into perfect, thick, modern arches as if ripped from this month’s glossy fashion magazines. And then below, eyes with wide-open pupils stare intensely at nothing, as if I don’t exist. I feel my reality challenged. And even more so since the eyes themselves are…
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Fear, Trembling and Madness After Bibi’s Re-Election
I’m in Tel Aviv. I love Tel Aviv. Who doesn’t? I’m in a boutique hotel on Gordon Street, facing the Gordon Beach, and I’m ready for breakfast. “What would you like to order?” asks the waiter. I like the waiters at this hotel. They are young and handsome, they look intellectual, and all of them…
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Daniel Weiss Calls Metropolitan Museum Job Running the ‘Yankees’ of Art
Visiting the Memorial de Caen museum in Normandy, France, in 1996, Daniel Weiss was captivated by eight photographs showing the public hanging of three partisans in Minsk, Belarus, on Oct. 26, 1941. The two male victims’ identities were known, but the female was anonymous, and Weiss set out to learn who she was. By the…
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Anatomy of the Murderers
● The Third Reich in History and Memory By Richard J. Evans Oxford University Press, 496 pages, $29.95 However deranged his deeds, Adolf Hitler was not certifiably mad. The German people did not voluntarily embrace the dictator, but acquiesced in his rule only after a campaign of terror that silenced or sidelined the political opposition….
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