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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The Secret Jewish History of Pink Floyd
Try as hard as they might, Pink Floyd is the band that refuses to die. The group’s founder and original visionary, Syd Barrett, called it quits in 1968, and by any rights it should have ended there. Yet the group has survived the loss of two frontmen and other founding members, and has endured changing…
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Music A Song for the Victims
Within hours of today’s terrorist attack on the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood, Israeli singer Amir Benayoun had already written, produced and released a new song about the killing of four Jewish worshipers by Palestinians. The popular musician, who sings in Hebrew and Arabic, has a history of responding to political…
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Searching for Amenia, New York’s Lost Jewish Vacationland
One spring day in 1927, two New York City real estate speculators drove upstate to Dutchess County with a couple of girls and had a bit to drink. Before they got home again, they had bought half of Amenia, an old upstate mining hamlet ringed with dairy farms. By summer, they were selling bungalows on…
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The Greatest Yiddish Writer You Never Heard Of
● Memories and Scenes: Shtetl, Childhood, Writers By Jacob Dinezon Translated from the Yiddish by Tina Lunson Jewish Storyteller Press, 240 pages, $19.95 In “Apocalypse,” a short story by Yiddish writer Jacob Dinezon, three elderly Jews get to talking about the concept of Rothschild, and about whether such a person actually exists. “In reality there…
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Books Is Exile Good for the Jews?
The political scientist Alan Wolfe published his latest book about the Jewish diaspora, “At Home in Exile,” in late October, just weeks before Sheldon Adelson uttered his most recent outrageous remarks. Too bad. Adelson’s unfortunate rant would have provided another example to prove Wolfe’s point. Adelson, the zillionaire philanthropist and businessman, is not known for…
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New Offerings From the Jewish Bookshelf
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Can Internship Program Build High-Tech Bridge Between Israel and Palestinians?
Sari Taha is a 26-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem whose goal is to be a leader in the West Bank’s tech industry. His training ground? Israel. Over the summer, Taha began an internship at Takwin Labs, an Israeli incubator for Arab tech companies. He worked as an analyst, fielding pitches from entrepreneurs and researching market…
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Of Egg Creams, Ed Koch and 49 Other Facts You Didn’t Know About Jewish New York
1. The first Jews to set foot in North America arrived in New York as a group of 23 in 1654. 2. Congregation Shearith Israel, founded in New York in 1654, was the first synagogue in the colonies. It was the sole purveyor of kosher meat until 1813. 3. By the late 19th century, there…
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Alexander Grothendieck, Brilliant Jewish Mathematician, Dies at 86
The French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, who died on November 13 at age 86, was profoundly influenced by his family roots. His father Alexander “Sascha” Schapiro was a Russian Jewish social progressive who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. Grothendieck’s work, finding connections between algebra and geometry, helped to create the field of algebraic geometry. His…
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Amy Reichert’s Art Reinvents Judaica
Calling all Cassandras, those given to gloom and doom about the pliancy of contemporary Jewish life, much less its future. I suggest they make a beeline for Chicago’s Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership’s new exhibition, “Amy Reichert: Reinventing Judaica,” whose display of Jewish ritual objects will go a very long way toward dispelling…
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Two Friends, 1 Mission and 65,000 Documents
Investment banker Lewis Lehrman had been collecting historical documents for almost thirty years when his friend Richard Gilder walked into his office one afternoon in the late 1980s. Lehrman, who had taught history at Yale and Harvard, was looking through a catalog of historical documents that he was considering for purchase. After Gilder asked about…
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