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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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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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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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…
The Latest
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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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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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‘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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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…
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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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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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