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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A Lizard’s Eye View of the Conflict in Israel
My three sons were looking for lizards when the first sirens blared. Overlooking the sea, Independence Park in Tel Aviv is the perfect place to find lizards, if you can force yourself to be still enough to evade their detection. To say the sirens broke the silence is an understatement. You don’t have to be…
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Books Heart as Tender as Brisket
A version of this story first appeared on Women’s Voices for Change. The best comic novel I’ve read this year wasn’t published by Random House or Penguin. It was self-published by Philadelphia writer Stacia Friedman. The title? “Tender is the Brisket.” Does the book live up to the comic promise of that title? Absolutely. Ruth…
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All God’s Griffins Got Wings at Cleveland Synagogue
The ark at Cleveland’s Orthodox Green Road Synagogue looms on an intimidating platform above the congregation. Alternating tan and umber rays — evocative of the divine lights that emanate from the sun in ancient Egyptian art and of St. Francis’s stigmata in Christian paintings — culminate in diamond-shaped niches above the chairs reserved for synagogue…
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Why Did John Kerry Mock ‘Pinpoint Operation’ in Gaza?
‘That is a hell of a pinpoint operation, a hell of a pinpoint operation,” Secretary of State John Kerry said to Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace on Sunday, July 20, in reference to the Israeli military operation in Gaza. The channel’s viewers did not get to hear this remark, because Kerry made it after he…
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Why Are There So Few Men in Jewish Nursery School Classrooms?
It’s circle time in classroom four. Sixteen 5-year-olds sit on the carpet and patiently wait for the weather report. After observing Amsterdam Avenue through the large windows of the JCC in Manhattan’s nursery school, a blond girl in a pink dress announces, “It’s sunny and cloudy.” Her peers seem content with the analysis, and the…
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A People’s Theatrical History of Howard Zinn
Is the bard mightier than the sword? As war rages around the globe, playwright Bianca Bagatourian ponders this question as she brings “The Times of Our Lies, A Play about the Life and Times of Howard Zinn” to debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The Brooklyn-born and raised son of Jewish immigrants, Zinn, who died…
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Life Is a Chai-Way for Jewish Biker Clubs
When Gil Paul took up the motorbike around 10 years ago, he did a half-hearted Internet search for other Jewish motorcyclists. “I just didn’t imagine that there were Jews that rode,” he said. “As luck would have it, I found the Hillel’s Angels.” Call it luck — mazel, perhaps — but it turns out that…
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Pulitzer Prize-Winning Marilynne Robinson Discusses Her First Trip to Israel
Marilynne Robinson is the Pulitzer and Orange Prize-winning author of the novels “Housekeeping,” “Gilead,” “Home” and the forthcoming “Lila.” Not long before hostilities broke out in the region, she attended the fourth annual International Writer’s Festival at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim cultural center in Jerusalem. Robinson is a committed Christian who grew up Presbyterian and now…
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‘Jews Who Rock’ Only Scratches Surface of Fame and Faith
In the gallery of Jewish Museum Milwaukee, sunlight streams in through windows that display colorful floor-to-ceiling banners from a concert shot taken at Milwaukee Summerfest in 1995. Nearby is a display of a redwood and abalone inlay bass guitar loaned to the museum by members of Howie Epstein’s family. Howie, bassist for Tom Petty and…
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Living Under the Iron Dome
The Middle East conflict: No doubt you have heard this phrase at least a thousand and one times, and so have I. The conflict, as you probably heard over a thousand times too, is the result of settlements. And now that rockets are flying over Israel, I’ve decided to go to the settlements to check…
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Are Michelangelo’s Drawings Anti-Semitic?
Ancestral Torpor: Jews and Christians in the Sistine Chapel By Giovanni Careri Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 325 pages, $36 The American Jewish writer Irving Stone (born Tannenbaum) aptly titled his 1961 novel about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” For centuries, ecstatic tourists have admired the…
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