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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Legendary South African Jewish Athlete Dies at 103
South African Jewish cricketer Norman Gordon, who has died today at the age of 103, epitomized speed and durability in sport. Gordon was the first Test cricketer to become a centenarian (duration is a key to Test cricket itself, the longest form of the sport, which may last up to five days.). In Gordon’s day…
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How Kosher Food Came To Montana
When Rabbi Chaim Bruk and his wife Chavie Bruk arrived in Montana in 2007, they found a culinary desert, kosher food-wise. “Other than the generic food on the supermarket shelves, it was really difficult to find any kosher food — no frozen items, not a lot of dry goods,” the rabbi said. “It was a…
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No Ordinary Summer For Students in Israel War Zone
The Michigan State University students were still jet-lagged from their ten-hour flight when news of rockets striking Sderot reached them in Jerusalem. The next morning, June 29 — just the third day of their summer Jewish Studies program in Israel — the students heard Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaim Israel “ready” for what would soon…
The Latest
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Music Israeli Band Shmemel Urges Aliyah — to Berlin
Still shows Israeli woman with a sign that reads “We left for Berlin.” / Shmemel “Berlin” is a very catchy tune, half-way between pop and hip-hop, performed by Israeli band Shmemel — and anyone who sees Israel as the Jewish homeland and/or can hum “Jerusalem of Gold” should probably give it a good hard listen….
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Changing Names of ISIS Reveal Growing Ambitions
Ed Ravin writes: “The American media refer to the jihadist movement that has taken over a big chunk of the Middle East as ISIS, an abbreviation of’ ‘the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.’ Canadian journalists, on the other hand, call it ISIL, for ‘the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.’ The Arabic word…
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Investing in Colorado’s Youth and Beyond
Five years ago, Kendall Weistroffer had almost no connection to Judaism. The Colorado native rarely stepped foot in a synagogue, hadn’t celebrated a bat mitzvah and seemed as likely to study Finnish as Hebrew. She eventually met Rabbi Michael Sunshine, director of Jewish Student Connection, a network of Jewish high school discussion groups in Denver,…
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Travels in Poland and Israel, Between Old Wars and New
As I travel through Poland and Israel, watching, discussing and writing about films, I find myself tracing the continuities, as well as the tensions, of Jewish identity. The only child of Polish Holocaust survivors, I am returning to Poland for the first time in 25 years, exploring what Judaism means there now. My mother, who…
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‘Voices and Visions’ Spreads Through the World by Graphic Design
On a shady hill in Jerusalem, a group of students and their teacher pass around a poster. It’s a series of rainbow-colored arcs set against a grey background. Halfway down, a quotation, in black and white, from Martin Buber bisects the page: “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” Buber was…
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‘The Notebook’ Is the Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of
I was never much of a fairy-tales kid. Or a fan of anything that was slightly gorier than Maisy books. I had to leave the movie theater halfway through “Babe” (because the farmer points a gun at Babe, the pig), “Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter” (because one character shows up with a cut on his forehead…
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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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