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
Holland’s Largest Jewish Bookstore Closes for Good
One of Western Europe’s largest Hebrew bookstores has closed down in Amsterdam as its former owners prepare to immigrate to Israel. Samech, located in southern Amsterdam, has been supplying Hebrew-language books to members of Holland’s Jewish community for nearly 40 years and possessed a stock of 100,000 books, according to the website of the Dutch…
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BRCA ‘Jewish’ Cancer Gene Mutations Often Go Untested — At Deadly Cost
When Marcia Watson-Levy was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997 at age 58, she suspected that heredity played a role: Her sister Rhoda had died of breast cancer 12 years before, at 52. Yet Watson-Levy, who then lived in San Francisco, said that none of her physicians — her primary doctor, her surgeon or her…
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Is Jewish Girl Star of Edouard Manet’s Famed Painting ‘The Railway’?
Cast in the major exhibition “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” (through September 29 at the Art Institute of Chicago), certain paintings expose their undergarments, so to speak. The exhibit, jointly organized with Paris’s Musée d’Orsay and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was shown earlier this year, features a Who’s Who of impressionist painters….
The Latest
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Coriell Institute Gives Patients a Genetic Crystal Ball — With Consequences
An email popped up in Hershel Richman’s inbox. “Your new personalized risk report is now available through the CPMC web portal!” the email cheerfully informed him. Its contents were tactfully vague: some talk of “genetic counselors” and a medicine collaborative. But this wasn’t some credit report spam, or a Nigerian phishing scam. No, Richman, a…
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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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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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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…
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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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