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 Ruth Calderon Transforms Israeli Politics — and Talmud
● A Bride For One Night: Talmud Tales By Ruth Calderon, translated by Ilana Kurshan The Jewish Publication Society, 184 pages, $21.95 If Ruth Calderon did not exist, it would be necessary to dream of someone like her. For almost half a century, American expatriates and a small group of native Israelis have creatively and…
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Music Brazilian School Apologizes for Test Question Comparing Israelis to Nazis
A school in Rio de Janeiro published a public apology for an exam question that compared Israelis to Nazis. The geography exam for eighth-graders at Colégio Andrews included a question that said Jews were once chased by Hitler and today another people is victimized by the Israelis, who compel them to live under their rule…
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Music Israel August Tourism Numbers Take a Sharp Downturn From Last Year
Israel’s August tourist numbers took a sharp downturn from the previous year’s figures. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 182,000 visitor entries were recorded for the month in Israel, down 36 percent from August 2013. Of the visitor entries, 164,000 were tourists staying more than one night, 32 percent less than August a year…
The Latest
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How Steven Pinker Became the Anti-Maven of Language
Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard, didn’t coin “language maven” (William Safire did, back in the ’70s, to describe himself), but he did more than anyone else to popularize the term. In a 1994 article in The New Republic called “Grammar Puss,” included in his subsequent book “The Language Instinct,” Pinker…
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The Spy Who Came In From Hamas
With the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories constantly shifting between open conflict and frail cease-fires this summer, the release of the documentary “The Green Prince” could not be timelier. Directed by Nadav Schirman, the film, which opens on Friday in New York, tells the story of Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas…
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Irgun Fighter Remembers the Altalena
Malca Fein is a fit, sharp, outspoken, perfectly groomed octogenarian with a just a hint of an accent. But get her talking about the past and the fiery Zionist freedom fighter burns through her grandmotherly facade. At the age of 16, Malca, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1925 and now makes her home…
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7 Facts About Jewish Tennessee
1. Tennessee’s first known Jewish settler, David Hart, arrived in Memphis in 1838. 2. In 1896, 19-year-old Adolph Ochs, the son of German Jewish refugees, bought a controlling share of the failing Chattanooga Times. After making the paper profitable, he went on to buy The New York Times in 1896. During his time as publisher,…
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How Elvis Presley Missed His True Calling — As a Cantor
In the summer of 1954, Elvis Presley released his first single. He had one problem: He couldn’t play it. The aspiring 19-year-old singer was living with his parents at 462 Alabama Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. With rent at $50 a month, his family was too poor to afford a record player. So, as he often…
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The Wonder Women of Video
Nowhere, perhaps, is the distinction between interior and outside space more pronounced than in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” Prince Prospero and his privileged colleagues hole up in “the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys,” which is decorated with the prince’s “eccentric yet august taste.” The outside world, plagued…
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Rumors Arise of Jewish Emancipation by Russian Czar
1914 • 100 years ago Jewish Emancipation by the Czar? A number of interested parties that are participants in the current European war are courting the Jews of the Pale of Settlement. Correspondents in St. Petersburg have reported that the Russian government is not averse to giving its Jews full civil rights and equality, just…
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Slouching Through Catalonia, One Jewish Site at a Time
This summer, my wife and I spent our vacation in Barcelona, Spain, because a friend had offered us free lodging in the apartment her family had held onto after they fled Franco’s Spain. I’d longed to visit the city for years, mostly because of the romantic notions of the Catalan people’s anarchistic spirit that had…
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