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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Houdini, My Father and Me
My father, a New York psychoanalyst, wrote about the sons of passive or absent fathers. (There was doubtless a reason why they interested him.) Among his many elegant papers and monographs, covering such (seemingly) disparate characters as Bishop James Pike and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, are two published full-length biographies, one of Joseph Conrad (whose father…
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It’s Getting Harder To Get Kicked Out of Hebrew School
For Nadine Epstein, it was a piece of gum she spat out… right into her teacher’s face. For Sharon Feder, it boiled down to pesky questions about the nature of the universe. And for Atarah Derrick, it was the storyboard of The Romantics’ song “Talking in Your Sleep” that teachers found lodged in her notebook….
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Books The Clothes We Carried
Musician Rosanne Cash reminisces about a purple shirt that once belonged to her legendary father. Designer Cynthia Rowley rhapsodizes about the Girl Scouts sash that helped ignite her entrepreneurial spark. And an octogenarian Holocaust survivor named Dorothy Finger shares memories of a suit made with a bolt of cloth she took from her childhood home…
The Latest
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The Revolution Will Be Animated
Is it better to live a happy life of fantasy or to be unhappy knowing the truth? Are the choices we make truly free, or do social pressures coerce us? If you could choose to be someone else, would you rather be Jesus Christ or Ron Jeremy? These questions roll around like a bag of…
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Seeking To Bridge Gap Between Jews and Urban St. Louis
In her travels throughout St. Louis as coordinator of the Student-to-Student program, Fawn Chapel has gotten to hear some humorous questions regarding Jewish life and culture. “One time, a kid asked, ‘So if you read backwards, do you also speak backwards?’” Chapel recalled. Other favorites include “Do you celebrate birthdays?” and “Can you celebrate Thanksgiving?”…
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Jill Sobule’s Adaptation of ‘Yentl’ Hews Closely to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Groundbreaking Work
Somehow it seems absolutely right that the woman who wrote and sang the MTV hit “I Kissed a Girl” and “Supermodel” is penning the slightly subversive, excellently wry and humorous music and lyrics for “Yentl.” No, not the “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” “Yentl” that Barbra Streisand boldly made in homage to herself; the upcoming…
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Yiddish Tango Is Irresistible Musical Hybrid
(JTA) — The music that packs the Skirball Cultural Center’s stately courtyard – Yiddish tango – is a musical hybrid twice over. On the tango side, it is a blend of African-born rhythms and a potpourri of European music styles. On the Yiddish side, it combines mournful liturgical melodies with folk songs. Tango, too, is…
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A Report From the Jewish Genealogists’ Summer Camp
As a latecomer and a relative newbie in Jewish genealogy, I have to admit I was a little apprehensive this July as I walked into the lobby of the Hilton Salt Lake City Center where the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies was holding its 34th annual conference. This was the tribe’s gathering of the…
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The Details Are in the Devil
Christophe Barbier, editor of the influential left-leaning French weekly L’Express, published a column in his paper earlier in August about the upsurge of anti-Semitism in France in the wake of the fighting in Gaza. After condemning the phenomenon, Barbier turned to French Jews and in turn condemned those of them who, despairing of life in…
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A Burning Memory of Utah
In Ogden, Utah, where I grew up, the streets are named after United States presidents. They run in chronological order from the city center up to the Wasatch Mountain Range, ending with Buchanan. The only exceptions are Lincoln and Grant, which curiously precede Washington — a tribute to the war that began and ended before…
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6 Surprising Facts About Jewish Utah
1. Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, donated land to create the first Jewish cemetery in Salt Lake City. 2. Simon Bamberger became Utah’s fourth governor after he was elected in 1916. 3. In 1934, students at the University of Utah created an anti-fascist group to “defend minority rights…
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