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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Masada Stubbornly Gives Up Its Secrets — Lice and All — After 50 Years
(Haaretz) — It looks like an ordinary lice comb, with wider teeth on one side for untangling knots and finer teeth on the other for removing nits. Except that this one happens to be made of wood, rather than metal. And it also happens to be about 2,000 years old. Holding the recently unearthed artifact…
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My Dinner With Leonard Bernstein
Although marred by unexplained omissions and bowdlerizations, the publication of “The Leonard Bernstein Letters” brought to mind a dinner I attended at Bernstein’s Fairfield, Conn., home around 30 years ago. Unlike the interviewer, Jonathan Cott, author of “Dinner With Lenny: The Last Long Interview With Leonard Bernstein,” I did not ask the maestro any portentous…
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Film & TV We Are All the ‘Other Israel’
At some point in the evolution of American national thought Martin Luther King Jr. went from being a political firebrand to being a national icon. You have to be pretty far outside the mainstream in 2013 to object to Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Likewise the Other Israel Film Festival started out as a way…
The Latest
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Books In Joshua Safran’s Memoir, Jack Kerouac Meets Edgar Allan Poe
Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid By Joshua Safran Hyperion, 288 pages, $24.99 Among the American contributions to world literature, perhaps least appreciated is the genre of automotive horror. To be sure, we are acknowledged to have invented the road trip, which was prophesied by Huck Finn and Lewis and…
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Doris Lessing and the Jews
Doris Lessing, who died on November 17 at age 94, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature for her prolific writings ranging from autobiography to what she called “space fiction.” Sometimes overlooked was the lasting inspiration which Lessing, born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in Persia, drew from Jews and Jewish heritage. In 1925, her…
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Ari Shavit Still Believes in a ‘Promised Land’
Ari Shavit wants to do nothing less than prompt a fresh discourse on Israel, something free and loving, critical and authentic, a conversation that accepts both the miracle and the true consequences of the Jewish state, one that will bring American Jews closer to the real Israel and Israelis closer to their own lost narrative….
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Who Is Mystery Woman in Iconic Photo of Old Jordan Valley?
(Haaretz) — Photography researcher Guy Raz has spent the past few months going through 50,000 negatives of old pictures for a new exhibition he’s curating that will display, among other items, old photos taken in the Jordan Valley. In the midst of his work, he came upon a series of mysterious photographs of an unknown…
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Did Adam and Eve Speak Hebrew in the Garden of Eden?
An article recently posted in the online Jewish magazine Tablet is titled “Examining Edenics, the Theory That English (and Every Other Language) Came From Hebrew”; it bears the subtitle “An eccentric Jerusalem-based researcher believes he’s found the key to the origin of tongues — in the Bible.” The “guru of Edenics,” as the Tablet article…
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Books Scholastic Puts Israel Back on ‘Stilton’ Map
Scholastic had already apologized for publishing a children’s book in its popular Geronimo Stilton series that included a map of the Middle East leaving out Israel. Stung by the fierce reaction, the publishing giant has gone one step further. It reworked the animated map to include Israel. It also told parents it would replace copies…
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Seeking Harmony and Finding Transcendence at The Cloisters
Janet Cardiff’s “The Forty Part Motet” is a transcendent work of art. Consisting of forty speakers arranged in an oval, each playing the separately recorded voice of a member of a choir, it envelops the listener in a sea of sound. And now, installed (until December 8) in a reconstructed 12th century church at The…
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Jews Join Nation in Mourning Assasination of President John F. Kennedy
1913 •100 years ago More Blood Libels in the Wake of Beilis Verdict In the wake of the “Not guilty” verdict in the Beilis blood libel trial, Russian anti-Semites are furious and have stepped up their activities. They are spreading lies and rumors in their newspapers — for example, stating that Jews had bribed the…
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