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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Why I Donated My Eggs at 21
‘When you turn 21, then you can do what you want,” my mother said over and over again. While most of my friends were counting down for tattoos and piercings that would “make the neighbors talk,” I was waiting for the day I would be able to help a couple have a baby. I still…
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Where We Found Respite From Discrimination
No sooner have we taken our summer vacation than some of us have begun to plan the next one. Where we go and what we see are determined by any number of factors, from the flexibility of our calendars to the elasticity of our budgets. One thing, though, that no longer affects our choice of…
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Blowing the Shofar in Cairo
‘Have you ever prepared a Jewish body for burial?” It was Saturday morning, April 13, 2013. The person on the line had called me hours earlier to let me know that Carmen Weinstein, leader of Cairo’s Jewish community, had died. I had arrived in Cairo nearly eight months earlier to work at the U.S. Embassy,…
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Music How Michael Alpert Brought Klezmer Into the 21st Century
The scent of herring; owlish spectacles; dusty, tragedy-laden archives; scratchy vinyl records you wouldn’t want your friends to know about — these are the things one sometimes associates with Yiddish culture. For more than three decades, Michael Alpert has worked hard on preserving and reviving an Eastern European Jewish tradition that is precisely the opposite…
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Music Soundtrack of Our Spirit: The Podcast
Readers have been calling and emailing us, asking for a podcast version of our playlist so they can listen to it in yet more situations — even on those infrequent occasions when they can’t stream the playlist from here. So we heard you and put together a single podcast with our top five songs and…
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Patrick Stewart Bluntly Channels a Jewish Writer’s Sensibility
I don’t know if “Blunt Talk,” the new comedy on Starz starring Patrick Stewart as a disaster-prone news anchor, is any good. But I do know that I like it. The show is strange and manic, and has a lot of witty lines about the Falklands War. It also has weak dialogue and contrived plot…
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Books ‘Eating Delancey’ — and Enjoying Every Morsel
— what a super name for a book. I’ve had this relatively new volume by Aaron Rezny and Jordan Schaps on my desk for a little while now, and I keep dipping back into it because it’s so rich in delicious tidbits about the Jewish foodways of New York’s Lower East Side. It’s kind of…
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Film & TV Theo Bikel Sang ‘Hava Nagila’ During a Hijacking, And Other Stories From Sue Mengers’ Epic Life
Did you cry during “Love Story”? Sing along to “Funny Girl”? Swoon over “The Way We Were”? For that, and a lot more, you can thank Sue Mengers. Before this badass lady came along, talent agents were basically baby-sitters to the stars: you tried to keep them in line, and if that failed, you prayed…
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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…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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News Middlebury College Hillel votes to rebrand, distancing from parent group on Israel
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