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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How Alison Levine Reached the Summit of Everest and Business
Alison Levine is scheduled to speak to the New York chapter of 85 Broads, a national women’s networking group. That is, she will speak if she can get to the meeting room. Levine and her retinue — four representatives of her publisher and a reporter — are in the lobby of the McGraw-Hill Building trying…
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No One Cared About Sex Education in Soviet Russia
● The Scent of Pine By Lara Vapnyar Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $25 Twist endings must be well-beloved, so often are they deployed today. (Here’s a twist: Let things be what they are.) To be fair, late-in-the-game surprises, especially when things add up, more or less, are mostly a reviewing annoyance, forcing a reckoning…
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Why Non-Orthodox Judaism Is Doomed
Back in 1977, a young writer published a bold book that tried to propel aliyah, or emigration to Israel, to the heart of the American Jewish agenda. Hillel Halkin, who had made the move himself from New York seven years earlier, didn’t mince his words, and declared the Diaspora “doomed.” The future of the Jewish…
The Latest
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Lipa Schmeltzer Reaches For Broadway and Beyond
It’s not every day that Town Hall, New York City’s fabled home to Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and other legendary performers, gets to welcome a yarmulke-clad crowd of 1,500. And it is not every day that the yarmulke-clad crowd of 1,500 gets to see one of its own perform on a Broadway stage. On the…
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A Kabbalah for Architects?
● Kabbalah in Art and Architecture By Alexander Gorlin Pointed Leaf Press, 192 pages, $60 ● Constructing Memory: Architectural Narratives of Holocaust Museums By Stephanie Shosh Rotem Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 217 pages, $71.20 Although architecture has long been thought of as enjoying minimal importance in the Jewish tradition, present-day scholarship continues to show…
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Apple’s Jewish History — 30 Years After Iconic Super Bowl Ad
Thirty years ago, a revolutionary Super Bowl commercial by Apple boldly proclaimed that “1984 won’t be like 1984” because of the imminent arrival of the Macintosh computer. Two days later, on January 24, a young Steve Jobs officially introduced the computer that would change the history of personal computing. But behind the charismatic, bow-tied genius…
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Books B.J. Novak Is Writing a Children’s Book
All that dancing around to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” in “Saving Mr. Banks” seems to have given B.J. Novak a taste for children’s literature. The Jewish actor and TV writer, who plays composer/lyricist Bob Sherman in the movie about the making of “Mary Poppins,” has signed with Penguin Young Readers Group to do a…
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Picturing Love and Intermarriage in New York
In September 2009, an Israeli TV and internet campaign aimed at dissuading Jews from marrying non-Jews upset many in the Diaspora – including Yael Ben-Zion, an American-born photographer, who lives together with her French, non-Jewish husband in New York City. So Ben-Zion, 40, who grew up in Israel, posted an ad at an online parenting…
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Setting the Record Straight on Amiri Baraka
The Newark-born playwright and poet Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka), who died on January 9 at age 79, has been receiving tributes, including in a few Jewish publications. This is unusual, for regardless of the supposed merits of his writings, over some decades Baraka produced a consistent series of…
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Polish Parliamentarian Says Jews Must Emigrate
1913 •100 years ago Moyshe the Greener To Face Death Twice For the second time, Morris Bernstein, better known as “Moyshe the Greener,” will finally stand before a Brooklyn grand jury for last December’s murder of the Brownsville cloakmaker Harry Vileinki. The case made waves because fellow cloakmaker Abe Lipshitz was initially arrested for the…
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How Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’ Rescued My American Dream
I discovered “Girls” when it was well into the second season. I had lived in New York for several months to attend the Columbia University School of Journalism. The initial excitement of being in the City That Never Sleeps had waned. I had gotten used to discovering that almost every other person I met was…
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