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 Hasidism Bridges Boundary Between Christianity and Judaism
Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism By Shaul Magid Stanford University Press, 288 pages, $65 In some ways, the boundary between Judaism and Christianity is a boundary about boundaries — specifically, what separates humanity from God, and whether it is ever possible to bridge the gap. Christianity, of course, has among…
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The Walmart Jews
Bentonville, Arkansas — Walmart’s hometown — offers more than just low, low prices. It’s also an anomaly in the small-town South: a Jewish community that is actually growing. Since 2004, when a handful of families met in a suburban home to discuss the possibility of founding a synagogue, Walmart has attracted both Jewish corporate employees…
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My ‘Unorthodox’ Journey to Berlin
If you asked me a few years ago whether I’d be willing to live in Germany someday I would have laughed out loud. I’ve spent the last few years living in New England, where the subtle, nuanced undercurrent of anti-Semitism is positively glaring in comparison to New York City, where I was born and raised….
The Latest
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How to Send Your Jewish Kid to College — Without Stressing Out
While it’s never easy sending a kid off to college, you have to wonder if these are particularly trying times for Jewish parents. Alongside the usual concerns about academic success, laundry and the massive cost, Jewish families also contend with issues of assimilation, anti-Zionism and even anti-Semitism. After decades of normalization, Jews have, in recent…
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Can Digital Badges Save Hebrew School?
While purveyors of childhood Jewish education as a whole struggle with enrollment and relevance, a small number have become pioneering practitioners of “digital badging,” a new pedagogical model in which learners in a wide variety of learning environments earn digital badges that indicate their accomplishments, skills or knowledge. With help from associations like the Bill…
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Of Bill Clinton, Bagels and 9 Other Things About (Jewish) Arkansas
1) 1,725 Jews live in Arkansas. 2) In the early 1820’s, Abraham Block, a store owner, became the first Jew to settle in Arkansas. 3) Little Rock’s B’nai Israel, founded in 1866, is the state’s oldest Jewish congregation. 4) In the early 1880’s, a group of Jewish pioneers from New York founded the Am Olam…
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In Angouleme, Israeli Cartoonists Talk About Charlie Hebdo — And BDS
The International Comics Festival opens this weekend in Angouleme, France. Just like last year, SodaStream is one of backers of the festival. And once again, another petition to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel has popped up, calling on the festival’s organizers to refuse any funding and cooperation with Israeli companies. Last year, BDS’s main…
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How Franz Schubert Found Himself in Shul
Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs By Graham Johnson Yale University Press, 3,000 pages, $300 A few months before he died in 1828 at the age of 31, Franz Schubert produced a setting of the 92nd Psalm, Tov Lehodot La’Adonai. Yet, as Graham Johnson asks in his massive new compendium about the Austrian composer, “How many…
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Bernice Gordon, Jewish Crossword Maven, Dies at 101
Readers who try to solve a crossword puzzle with the clue “One of the Marxes” (answer: KARL) or “Old Broadway title beau” (answer: ABIE) are enjoying the concise wit of Bernice Biberman Gordon, a constructor of crosswords or cruciverbalist, as puzzle writers like to be called nowadays, who died on January 29 at age 101….
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Ze’eva Cohen Documents Her Gliding Career at Age 74
Ze’eva Cohen is tidying up her desk. The modern dancer who enjoyed a blaze of celebrity in the 1960s and ‘70s has reached the age where securing her place in history feels more urgent than satisfying a restless impulse to move. It’s too soon to say that she will never autograph another playbill, or smile…
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The Powerful Example Of The Jewish Abolitionists We Forgot
The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States — Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in late January 1865 — comes at an fraught moment in the history of race relations. Considering that black men are being killed by police at the same rate as they were lynched in the era of Jim Crow,…
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