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 Satmar Hasidim Are More Liberal Than Liberals
In the past few years I’ve been spending much of my time outside of New York, but now I’m here and I find that coming back is a bit challenging. When I’m in town I’m oblivious to the changes happening around me. Yes, I have eyes and I can see the changes but more often…
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Who Should Replace Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic?
Earlier this year, Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, announced that he would step down from his job in 2017. With Avery Fisher Hall, the orchestra’s home, scheduled to close in 2019 for two years of renovation, fevered speculation has ensued about his successor. Music directors should quit more often, as such…
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Yiddish Sex Tips for Girls Find Home in Jerusalem Library
A few months ago, Dr. Yoel Finkelman was browsing through the catalog of the New York auction house Kestenbaum & Company; it’s a regular chore at the National Library’s collections department. He noticed an interesting item. Finkelman, the curator of the library’s Judaica collection, noticed a Yiddish pamphlet titled “Advice for Women and Young Women…
The Latest
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The Nakedness of the Bible
The Jews and the Bible By Jean-Christophe Attias, translated by Patrick Camiller Stanford University Press, 256 pages, $22.95 The greatest irony of the Bible is that it stands for the opposite of irony — certitude, transcendence, holiness — yet it is filled with nothing but irony. A truly bizarre anthology of contradictory texts is regarded…
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Dream Home in Greenwich Village
Faye Ginsburg, 62, is a professor of anthropology at New York University in lower Manhattan. She is also the director of the Center for Media, Culture and History, co-director of the Council for the Study of Disability and president of the . Her husband, Fred Myers, 66, is also a professor of anthropology at NYU….
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Of Starbucks, Courtney Love and 8 Other Things About (Jewish) Washington
1) 46,000 Jews live in Washington. 2) Edward Salomon became Washington’s only Jewish governor in 1870. 3) Elected in 1875, Bailey Gatzert became the first (and so far only) Jewish mayor of Seattle. 4) Washington’s first synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, was founded in Spokane in 1892. 5) Seattle’s Orthodox population is centered around the neighborhood of…
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A New Arab Museum on the Periphery
“Our trip is canceled. The atmosphere in Sakhnin is very tense.” It was December 10, 2014, the night before I was due to visit the newly established Arab Museum of Contemporary Art, in Sakhnin, an Arab-Israeli city in the north of the country. I had received the phone call from the Haifa-based, Romanian-Israeli artist Belu-Simion…
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Film & TV ‘The Farewell Party’ Shows the Lighter Side of Euthanasia
At the beginning of “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen tells a joke about two old ladies vacationing at a Catskills resort: “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible,” says one. “Yeah, I know,” says the other, “and such small portions.” “Well that’s how I feel about life,” Allen continues. “Full of loneliness and misery…
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POEM: Kedusha (Zeh Lazeh)
המשרתים…נותנים באהבה רשות זה לזה להקדיש ליוצרם… — Shacharit liturgy I can’t see ghosts by myself. I need help, from partner or stranger, like once when I lay awake with a friend in a cabin in Connecticut and we told each other about each creak, how we would put salt on the sills tomorrow because…
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Watch Frum March To Protest Sabbath-Violating Teens in Lakewood
Lakewood, New Jersey, is a bustling Haredi town organized around its grand yeshiva and dominated by strict rabbinic authority. So when a few rebellious teenagers took to hanging out by the lake on Sabbath afternoons — violating Sabbath rules by smoking and using their cellphones — the yeshiva’s head rabbis gathered dozens of men to march…
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Meet the Rapping Rabbi of Seattle
Simon Benzaquen, a Seattle rabbi, first earned fame as the “Rapping Rabbi” for his recordings and performances with rapper Nissim in 2013, but he has since found a way to use the same music to further one of his personal passions: preserving the Ladino language. In an effort to ensure that the language of Sephardic…
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