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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Death Is Muse for Israeli Artist Pesi Girsch
(Haaretz) — Rehabilitated cats live peacefully in Pesi Girsch’s bedroom. All 12 cats were injured when they were collected from the curbs in Tel Aviv’s Neveh Tzedek neighborhood, and she took care of them and saved their lives. In her everyday life, as in her art, there are many beautiful dead animals − on condition…
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Books Deborah Feldman Isn’t Telling You the Whole Story
● Exodus By Deborah Feldman Blue Rider Press, $26.95, 288 pages While Jews around the world are preparing to retell the story of their ancestral exodus from Egypt, another story of an exodus is making its way onto bookshelves. Deborah Feldman, the 27-year-old author of the 2012 best-selling memoir “Unorthodox,” is releasing her second memoir,…
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David Grossman Creates Yet Another Wrenching Masterpiece
For readers left feeling bereft after David Grossman’s portrayal of the relation between the life of a family and the tragic corrosiveness of Israeli militarism in “To the End of the Land,” here is an audaciously unorthodox work that may serve as an emotional sequel of sorts. If we assumed that Grossman could hardly delve…
The Latest
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Books Bosnia Through Muslim Eyes
New York author Susan Shapiro and her Muslim physical therapist, Kenan Trebincevic, bonded, and together they wrote the recently published “The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return” (Penguin Books). The book tells the story of the Bosnian War through Trebincevic’s eyes. In 1992 he was 12 and living a normal, happy childhood,…
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Marlo Thomas Made Me the Man I Am Today
Forty years ago, when Marlo Thomas met with executives at ABC Television after turning in the final cut of “Free to Be… You and Me,” the one-hour special they’d commissioned based on her best-selling children’s album, they told her, in that way the business people who control our media so often do, that they loved…
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Books In Search of a More Perfect Union
A rabbi and an imam walk into a bookstore. That may sound like the first line of a joke, but these aren’t any old rabbi and imam, and they’re not joking around. Rabbi Marc Schneier, the prominent Hampton Synagogue founder and Imam Shamsi Ali, former leader of the Islamic Cultural Center, a major Manhattan mosque,…
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Why Evangelical Christians Are Right To Be Angry About ‘Noah’
When the Biblical Noah listened to that voice in his head (God?) and built a huge ark to survive a flood, he was taking an expensive risk. Paramount Pictures has taken an equally expensive risk — $125 million, give or take — entrusting auteur Darren Aronofsky to somehow bring together epic and indie styles, Biblical…
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A Century of Anti-Semitism on the American College Campus
Antisemitism on the Campus: Past & Present Edited by Eunice G. Pollack Academic Studies Press, 470 pages, $65 In 2012, the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise published “Israel and the Campus,” a study noting 674 anti-Israel events at 108 United States and Canadian universities during the 2011-12 academic year. It remains undetermined how many of these events…
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Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Noah’ Departs From the Bible, But Doesn’t Go Far Enough
For occultists, UFO conspiracy theorists, Atlantis enthusiasts, and eccentric spiritual types of all kinds, the story of Noah provides some tantalizing material. According to the book of Genesis, Noah’s great-grandfather Enoch lived to be 365 years old before he “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” “Nephilim” roamed the land while…
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Music Crimea Karaites Back Russia Takeover
(JTA) — Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the strategically critical peninsula that dangles from Ukraine into the Black Sea, has drawn international condemnation. But for the leader of the All-Ukrainian Organization of Crimean Karaites — a group with an unusual heritage that draws from Jewish traditions — joining Russia is a welcome development. “In Crimea, the…
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Music Center for American Progress Partners With Liberal Israeli Think Tank
An influential liberal Washington think tank with ties to the Obama administration is partnering with a progressive Israeli counterpart. The Center for American Progress is cosponsoring its first Israel event on April 1 with Molad: The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy. The symposium will address Israeli and U.S. interests in the Middle East….
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