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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Books
Why People Leave Orthodoxy — and How
Becoming Un-Orthodox By Lynn Davidman Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $27.95 In “Becoming Un-Orthodox,” a study of ex-Orthodox Jews by University of Kansas professor Lynn Davidman, a woman identified only as “Leah” describes Friday night meals in her parents’ home. “Shabbes was kind of a wash,” she says. “My father was always tired and so…
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Cookbook Collector Savors Recipes for Living in Michigan
For a woman her age, Jan Longone moves incredibly fast when she’s eager to point something out. The 81-year-old with a plump, soft face and fierce eyes direct from yenta central casting demanded that attention be paid to a French guidebook from the 1960s, open to a page with the loopy autograph of the then-up-and-coming,…
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How Ruby Namdar Wrote the Great Hebrew American Novel
I met Reuven “Ruby” Namdar on November 11, 2014 in New York, because I was writing a long piece about writers who live outside Israel and write in Hebrew. It turned out, by coincidence, that a few hours before our meeting he had gotten the biggest news of his career. He had been informed that…
The Latest
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Granddaughters of the Shoah
Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind By Sarah Wildman Riverhead Books, 400 pages, $27.95 A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France By Miranda Richmond Mouillot Crown, 288 pages, $26 The latest Holocaust memoirs are by people who weren’t there, who are linked to the tragedy by the…
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Of Gilda Radner, Ivan Boesky, Boisterous Brisket and 9 Other Facts About Jewish Michigan
1) 82,270 Jews live in Michigan. 2) Michigan’s first Jewish settler was Ezekiel Solomon. A fur trader, he operated a general store during the Revolutionary War. 3) Montreal-born fur trader Chapman Abraham was Detroit’s first Jewish settler, arriving there in 1762. 4) Founded in 1885 in Traverse City, Congregation Beth El is Michigan’s oldest synagogue….
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An Eccentric Archeologist Who Drew a Line in the Sand
A German Jewish Iranologist, who lost his University of Berlin post in 1935 after officially declaring that his grandparents were Jewish, is one of several focuses of an exhibit about Asian travel at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. “The Traveler’s Eye: Scenes of Asia” is on view through May 31. Ernst Herzfeld…
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‘Conversion’ Is Key to Early Education
A new effort underway in Denver, backed by a wide-ranging coalition of Jewish organizations, hopes to use modern marketing techniques to increase enrollment at early childhood education centers and, in the process, lure a new generation of young and sometimes leery families back into Jewish life. The goals of the $810,000 initiative, led by the…
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The Neal Pollack Guide to Awards Season
Awards season is here. I love it so much that I wish I were receiving an award myself. Seriously, I will accept any award, from any ceremony, in any category. “Where is my award?” I will ask, while watching my TV. But absent some miraculous occurrence whereby I am transported into another dimension in which…
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Behind the Small Screen at Jon Stewart’s Gig
Forget bagels, Katz’s Deli and Crown Heights — New York City doesn’t get any Jewy-er than at the Daily Show: The taping of the fake news comedy show from Comedy Central has a) Jon Stewart, b) free tickets and c) did I mention Jon Stewart? Located in a nondescript building on 11th Avenue near West…
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How Iranian-Jewish Women Started a Writers’ Revolution
The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World Edited by Houman Sarshar I.B. Tauris, 264 pages, $99 Of the 80,000 or so Jews still living in Iran when the 1979 Islamic revolution occurred, the vast majority have fled, leaving a community of about 20,000 to 25,000, according…
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Books Greener Pastures for Treasured Cookbook Shop
Bookshop owner Bonnie Slotnick took a quick break from packing to have her picture taken outside the 10th Street store. Photographs by Liza Schoenfein I was happy to read at the end of last week that Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, the beloved little shop on West 10th Street that recently lost its lease, had found new…
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