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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Why Do Jews Meditate? It’s All in the Worrying!
Dan Harris already had a lot going for him: He’s co-anchor of ABC News’ “Nightline” and “Good Morning America,” and a respected journalist. Now he’s also a best-selling author, with his recent memoir-cum-report on meditation, “10% Happier.” The book, subtitled “How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, And…
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The problem with John Judis’s book about Harry Truman and the Jews
Judis is clear about his agenda in writing 'Genesis'
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The Most Beautiful Word in the World?
The Hebrew word ḥ eshbon, pronounced “khesh-BONE” (with the second vowel halfway between an “o” and an “aw”), can mean sum, arithmetic, bank account or bill, and is also found in a number of common Israeli idioms, such as l’havi b’ḥ eshbon, to take into account; la’asot ḥ eshbon, to make a reckoning or assessment;…
The Latest
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Books Alice Munro Meets Auntie Chayele in Shirley Faessler Work
● A Basket of Apples By Shirley Faessler Now And Then Books, 184 pages, $18.95 Nobel laureate Alice Munro called Shirley Faessler, whom she knew personally, “a witty and uncompromising writer.” Readers of Faessler’s recently reissued collection of short stories, “A Basket of Apples,” will undoubtedly agree. Originally published in 1988 and long out of…
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Philip Roth, Once Outcast, Joins Jewish Fold With Jewish Theological Seminary Honor
(JTA) — What is being done to silence this man?” an American rabbi asked in a 1963 letter to the Anti-Defamation League. He was talking about the novelist Philip Roth, whose early novels and short stories cast his fellow American Jews in what some considered a none-too-flattering light. Fast-forward half a century. On Thursday, the…
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Crown Heights Jews Defending Themselves Against Hooligans
1914 • 100 years ago From Pogroms to Ellis Island As many readers already know, 800 Jewish families were expelled from Kiev about five weeks ago. The first of these unhappy immigrants landed recently on Ellis Island. An immigration official presented one of them, a cantor by the name of Eliyahu Teller, to reporters as…
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Germany’s Inferiority Complex and the Holocaust
● Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust By Götz Aly Metropolitan Books, 304 pages, $30 Early in his penetrating and provocative study of the roots of German anti-Semitism, “Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust,” Götz Aly quotes…
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Alejandro Jodorowsky Goes on a Voyage in Search of Himself
If you could go back and visit your childhood self, what would you say? Would you offer words of advice? Warning? Wonder how the child you were both is and isn’t the person you became? This theme is at the heart of “The Dance of Reality,” a new movie by Chilean-Jewish director Alejandro Jodorowsky. In…
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8 New Israeli Writers You Need To Read Right Now
Dalia Betolin-Sherman is the first Ethiopian woman to publish a volume of short stories in Hebrew. In conversation, she speaks modestly about the success of “How the World Became White,” which won the 2014 Ramat Gan prize for debut literature. I met her at the Tel Aviv café Tola’at Sefarim Maazeh, where she told me…
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When Auschwitz Was a Jewish Town
Of all the things and places to give an endearing Jewish name, Auschwitz would seem the most unlikely. Oshpitzin — which comes from the Aramaic word for guest, ushpizin, and is the name of a traditional Sukkot prayer that welcomes guests — was how Jews once referred to Oswiecim, the Polish town that would become…
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Family Escaping Russian Pogrom Incarcerated on Ellis Island
1914 • 100 years ago The Island of Blood and Tears Avrom Pogrebensky, a night watchman, scrimped and saved to bring his wife, Sarah Pogrebensky, and their two sons over to America from Samarkand, Russia. Finally united, the family was set to begin a new life in New York. But the school that the Pogrebenskys’…
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