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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Books
What Soccer Gave the Jews
Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The Story of English Football’s Forgotten Tribe By Anthony Clavane Quercus Publishing, 304 Pages Anthony Clavane’s accomplished and engaging work “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?” now out in paperback, is not about what Jews have given to English soccer, so much as what soccer has given to English…
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Could Resurgence of Anti-Semitism Lead To a Second Holocaust?
● Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives By Alvin H. Rosenfeld Indiana University Press, 576 pages, $35 It is unbelievable that in 2013 we are still talking about the foul topic of anti-Semitism. “The dislike of the unlike,” in historian Salo Baron’s pithy locution. Whatever the catch phrase, there are few phenomena in history that have a…
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IBD Patients Reveal Their Lonely Childhood Stories
Growing up can be hard under the best of circumstances. But try sharing with a friend your most intimate problem, one you secretly confront every day: that you live with a disease ravaging your waste disposal system. It’s a lonely journey, according to interviews with young people affected by Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, collectively…
The Latest
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Is ‘Yeshivish’ a Language or a Dialect Like ‘Ebonics’ — or Neither?
In last week’s column, I discussed Sarah Bunin Benor’s recent book, “Becoming Frum,” which dwells largely on the process whereby American Jews who have become religiously Orthodox adjust to the linguistic usages of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities they have joined. In many respects, as Benor points out, they have to learn to speak a…
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Non-Jews Hit by ‘Jewish’ Diseases Fall Through the Cracks of Genetic Screening
For three days in April, about 70 families whose lives have been upended by Tay-Sachs disease gathered in San Diego for the annual National Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases conference. The event — which attracted families caring for children with Tay-Sachs, as well as those who have lost loved ones to the degenerative disease that claims…
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Remembering Charlotte Delbo on the 100th Anniversary of Her Birth
August 10 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the non-Jewish French writer Charlotte Delbo, who was deported to Auschwitz and survived to bear witness. Delbo’s prose and verse writings were reprinted by Yale University Press under the title “Auschwitz and After,” while her plays — including some never previously printed — were recently…
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The Last Jews of Ethiopia
The last community synagogue in Gondar, in the north of Ethiopia, is in a rented building cordoned off from the street by large metal sheets. Several men passively stand guard in front. From the outside, a Jewish Agency for Israel sign is the main indication of what lies within. But neighbors know. “You,” two men…
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Chanel, Amanda, Joey and The Return of the Jewish American Princess
Stereotypes, canards, stock figures — the whole sorry business of labeling people wholesale rather than piecemeal — die hard. Just when you think they have gone away, into a historian’s drawer, they resurface, assuming a new lease on life. Neighborhoods come and go, people come and go, governments rise and fall, fashions wax and wane,…
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Barry Manilow’s 8 (Maybe) Most Jewish Songs
Though Barry Manilow’s musical “Harmony” tells a story about Jewish and non-Jewish singers whose lives and careers become upended by the Nazis, barely any trace of the multi-platinum-selling singer-songwriter’s Jewish heritage has been evident in his many pop hits. But perhaps we haven’t been looking closely enough. Extensive research combined with some imagination allows us…
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Barry Manilow Returns To His Jewish and Broadway Roots With ‘Harmony’
At a few minutes before 2 p.m., the mood in the Snapple Theater Center was loose, the ambiance casual bordering on schlumpy. In a low-ceilinged rehearsal room, there was a long table cluttered with papers, three-ring binders and Diet Cokes. A stage manager typed away on a laptop. A box of Cheez-It crackers and a…
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Books Joanna Hershon and Adelle Waldman Grow in Brooklyn
Two of the strongest novels published so far this year, Joanna Hershon’s “A Dual Inheritance” and Adelle Waldman’s “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” happen to be written by young, Brooklyn-based Jewish women writing smartly and wittily from the perspectives of men. This might not be a remarkable fact in and of itself: Look for…
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