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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Film & TV
‘Straight Outta Compton’ Is Surprisingly Good to the Jews
One of the more surprising aspects of “Straight Outta Compton” — F. Gary Gray’s propulsive and vibrant, if rather disjointed, film about the rise and fall of the seminal rap group N.W.A — is how dainty it is when it comes to portraying Jews and anti-Semitism. Whatever its merits and shortcomings, like the music it…
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Can Tel Aviv Help Cure My Son’s Diabetes?
Sometimes it’s better to leave the things we buy in the boxes they come in. Such was the case with the Hammacher Schlemmer recumbent exercise bicycle (assembly required) that I bought for my teenage son after he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and needed to stay on the move to bring his blood sugar…
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He’s Saying Hashem, But It Sounds Like Hare Krishna
Picture this: a rabbi who is also a martial artist leads a style of ancient Indian chanting in Hebrew. A knit yarmulke rests upon his flowing gray hair, and during Jewish mystical chants, he plays a harmonium — which looks like a cross between a keyboard and accordion — or sometimes just his guitar. He…
The Latest
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Film & TV Is the World Ready for a Rabbi Shmuley Boteach Talk Show?
Daytime television may soon be getting a little more exciting. This fall, Shmuley Boteach — the TV personality and Orthodox rabbi who isn’t afraid to talk very publicly and very explicitly about sex, intimacy and all things private — is hosting a new talk show, “Divine Intervention.” In this case, Boteach is that divine intervention…
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Music Who Will Be the Next Itzhak Perlman?
On August 31, the superstar Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman turns 70, and amid the mazel tovs, music lovers might wonder who will take over his prominent role in musical life when he is ready to retire. Fiddling is a demanding profession, rarely pursued at its highest levels by septuagenarians. Even the Olympian Jascha Heifetz scaled…
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Frida Kahlo’s Jewish Lover
Staring out of more than 50 portraits spread across a sprawling third-floor gallery, Frida Kahlo’s intense gaze greets visitors to the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto. But an unseen face on the other side of the camera looms just as large. Nickolas Muray was the Hungarian-born Jew who photographed Kahlo for over a decade…
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Could This Be The Future of the Jewish (Meta) Novel?
The Book of Numbers By Joshua Cohen Random House, 592 pages, $28 ‘This will kill that.” As the medieval archdeacon Claude Frollo in Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” speaks this prophecy of obsolescence, he points to a printed book and then a cathedral. Mass literacy, Hugo implies, eroded authoritarian Catholicism and replaced massive,…
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A Graphic Tale of the Bronx’s Toughest Jew
Julian Voloj came of age in the nation that gave rise to Nazism and forced his grandparents and great-grandparents to flee to South America. Growing up in a small German town near the Dutch border, the son of Colombian-born parents, the 41-year-old says he always felt that his Jewish and personal identity were complicated matters….
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Of Genetics and the Sanctity of Human Life
“You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who co-discovered DNA’s double strand architecture, wrote in his 1994 book on consciousness, “The Astonishing Hypothesis.”…
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Why We Have To Talk About Cancer
Having grown up within the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Midwood in Brooklyn, Rifky Tkatch, a social psychologist, knew that many in her community did not like to talk about cancer. Yet it wasn’t until she conducted focus group interviews with Orthodox Jewish women in Detroit in 2011 that she uncovered barriers to screening that stunned…
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When a Rabbi Was the Last Thing I Needed
Six years ago, I lost a friend to a drunk driver. I was a 19-year-old counselor at a sleepaway camp near Augusta, Maine, and I felt invincible. I had never experienced anything “bad” beyond some less-than-stellar marks on my college econ exams. Certainly no trauma. I knew nothing about death (beyond the passing of my…
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