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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Can Sephardic Jews Go Home Again — 500 Years After the Inquisition?
Madrid — The Spanish government expelled the Jews in 1492. In 2012, they said that they wanted us back. At a press conference that November, two ministers announced that any Sephardic Jew who wanted a Spanish passport could have one. Then nothing happened. By late 2013, Spain had not given out any passports. No one…
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Heyday of Jewish Boxing Recalled in Novel
(Haaretz) — A hundred years ago, the British magazine Boxing ran a story headlined “The Hefty Hebrew: The Shattering of a Silly Old Legend.” It featured a series of hard-hitting Jewish champs who were, the article declared, smashing ethnic stereotypes as they punched their way to glory in the ring. The years that followed became…
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When a Sentence Is Cruel and Unusually Long
An article on the Iranian nuclear program in the online paper the Washington Free Beacon tells of a reporter who asked a “senior administration official” about last November’s “Joint Plan of Action” agreement in Geneva. Did it, he inquired, prohibit the Iranians from designing new models of centrifuges? The answer received was: “We, designing is…
The Latest
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David Krakauer Gets ‘The Big Picture’
You wouldn’t think that a musician of David Krakauer’s caliber would be looking to put a new spin on his work, what with a nearly 30-year track record of virtuosity playing chamber music, klezmer and, most recently, a thrilling mash-up of funk, hip-hop and klezmer. But Krakauer’s manager, Steven Saporta, broached the idea of the…
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Books Gary Shteyngart Does Not Have a Self-Esteem Problem
You might suppose, should you have any familiarity with the writings of Gary Shteyngart, which are widely (and not inaccurately) assumed to be autobiographical, that the author has a bit of a self-loathing problem. Many people do: Papa Shteyngart, for example, frequently exhorts his “Little Son,” “Don’t write like a self-hating Jew.” Papa and Mama…
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A Storied History Among Anti-Semites in France
The French Jewish writer Pierre Assouline has long grappled with moral dilemmas resulting from the Nazi occupation of his country. In 2012, he was the first-ever Jew elected as one of the ten jurors for the Goncourt Prize, France’s top literary award meant to encourage young writers, established in 1903. Assouline’s newest novel, “Sigmaringen,” is…
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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…
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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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