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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Film Critic Stanley Kauffmann Dies at 97
Stanley Kauffmann, the American Jewish film critic who died on October 9 at age 97 was termed “one of the oldest working critics in history” in obits, but he was more than just a Methuselah among the thumbs-up-or-down crowd. Kauffmann’s long life gave him time to gain useful artistic experience and erudition by trying to…
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Making Room For American Jewish Studies
Last year, Tel Aviv University held what looks to have been a fascinating conference: “Minhagim: Custom and Practice in Jewish Life,” a cross-cultural inquiry into the nature of minhag, or custom, and its relationship to localized patterns of authority and ritual practice. Several days were devoted to exploring the ways in which Romanian Jews decorated…
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Books Fred Bahnson’s 6 Lessons
I don’t often get the opportunity to read books about people I know in real life. Something about the written word is a distant and surreal fantasy world sandwiched between two hard covers. Even if I was reading about real characters, they were never real to me. However, in reading Fred Bahnson’s newest book Soil…
The Latest
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Books Alice Munro, ‘Canadian Chekhov,’ Wins Nobel for Literature
Canadian Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for her tales of the struggles, loves and tragedies of women in small-town Canada that made her what the award-giving committee called the “master of the contemporary short story”. “Some critics consider her a Canadian Chekhov,” the Swedish Academy said, comparing her to the…
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Books Self-Avowed ‘Jewish-American Princess’ Chronicles Quest To Be African Masai Warrior
Mindy Budgor spent three months in training with Kenya’s Maasai tribe
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Lee Harvey Oswald and the Jews
Before he killed the president of the United States, Lee Harvey Oswald was a metal lathe operator at a radio and television factory in Minsk. He had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, hoping to take part in a revolution that, unbeknownst to him, had been snuffed out three decades earlier, when Stalin…
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Using Plastic Surgery To Combat Maternal Anxiety
● Textile By Orly Castel-Bloom Translated by Dalya Bilu The Feminist Press, 160 pages, $15.95 In Orly Castel-Bloom’s “Textile,” Amanda Gruber deploys an unusual strategy to help manage her particularly Israeli brand of maternal anxiety about the fate of her combat soldier son: undergoing serial cosmetic surgery. As the novel opens, Amanda is about to…
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Jewish ‘Bond Girl’ Christine Granville Fought the Nazis in Style
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville By Clare Mulley St. Martin’s Press, 448 pages, $26.99 A new book about the spy Christine Granville, born Krystyna Skarbek of Polish Jewish ancestry, raises the question of whether there could be any joy in espionage after Auschwitz. “The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets…
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Is There Anything Jewish About Giving to Charity?
● Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition by Gary A. Anderson Yale University Press, 232 pages, $30 Charity, as an old joke puts it, sometimes does begin at home, but it always begins with an annoying phone call. But Jews, with their high rates of charitable giving, have often been eager…
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Masturbation Could Force You To Fast For 11 Years — But Murder Is Cheap
As the world busies itself with the dead people of Syria, I walk the streets of holy Jerusalem in search of truth and wisdom, hoping to find a solution to this horrible situation that I could share with the leaders of the goyishe velt, and maybe prevent the unnecessary death and destruction that is taking…
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What Do the Kenya Mall Terrorists and Naughty Jewish Children Have in Common
David Bell writes to inquire: “At present, the Arabic-named ‘al-Shabab’ — an organization composed of young Somalian Muslim fanatics intent on murder and mayhem — is very much in the news. The Hebrew word shovav denotes a mischievous child worlds apart from such murderous thugs. And yet the Hebrew and Arabic words have in common…
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