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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Fraternity Branch Closes To Avoid Jewish Members
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 Years Ago 1913 The Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, an organization of secret societies…
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Three Jewish Albums Channel the Black Music Experience
Perhaps the story of the great Jewish music in America is truly that of its encounter with African-American music. Three terrific new albums traverse the traditions of Afrobeat, jazz and reggae, while at the same time staying informed — in very different ways — by music more traditionally associated with the Jewish sound. That two…
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Books Younger Than That Now
Earlier this week, Kathy Ebel wrote about her German-Jewish family and Nice Jewish Girl protagonists from New York City. Her first novel, “Claudia Silver to the Rescue” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is now available. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series….
The Latest
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The Provocative IDF Soldiers You Really Need To See
The Gaza Strip! IDF Girls Gone Wild! These are some of the nicknames for the recent scandal sparked by Facebook photos and video of semi-nude female IDF soldiers, striking poses and dancing on IDF bases and inside IDF facilities, in some cases carrying weapons and sporting (parts of) IDF uniforms. These stories seemed to be…
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Should Jews Be Watching Game of Thrones?
As one of the 5.2 million Americans who spurned “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” to make HBO’s “Game of Thrones” the most-watched show on cable in early June, I admit that I was transfixed by the bloodbath that took out many of the show’s most prominent figures. But as a Jew — and a soon-to-be…
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Books When You’re a Jew You Stay a Jew
Earlier this week, Kathy Ebel wrote about Nice Jewish Girl protagonists from New York City. Her first novel, “Claudia Silver to the Rescue” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is now available. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on…
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One Man Shares Tale of a Traditional Kosher Schechting Sheep Slaughter
“Are you ready for the lamb that Jacob ate?” read the irresistible subject line that stood out from the spam in my inbox. The email was an invite to join in a “sheep schechting,” a kosher slaughtering, at a local farm. The event promised a discussion about kashrut and perspectives on eco-kosher, lunch and a…
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Theater Legend David Rothenberg Does Some of His Best Work Offstage
David Rothenberg has little doubt that old people are invisible. But invisibility is not all bad, he explained cheerfully in the lobby of his building, in New York City’s Greenwich Village: “See how I’m dressed? It’s great. No one notices,” he said. Yes, his baggy knee-length shorts and loose-fitting, nondescript shirt are not high fashion,…
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The Jewish Designer Who Taught Marc Chagall
‘Though raised in a religious family, I threw off the old faith when I started to live my own life, as did so many men of my age,” the 21-year-old Sergei Diaghilev wrote to Leo Tolstoy in 1893. “I had to convince myself that many things I had previously accepted were merely fairy tales, which…
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Books Nice Jewish Girls Finish Whole
Kathy Ebel, a first-generation American, was born in Manhattan. Her blog, Fatherland: There’s No Place Like Home, or How and Why a Nice Jewish Girl Asked Germany to Take Her Back, chronicles her quest to have her German citizenship restored. Kathy considers Brooklyn her hometown and currently lives with her family in Los Angeles. “Claudia…
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Playing Hunger Games on the West Bank
● The Wall By William Sutcliffe Bloomsbury, 304 pages, $17.99 Children’s fairy tales often hinge on the simplest of dichotomies of good versus evil, or known versus unknown. Stray on the path to grandmother’s house, the moral goes, and some hungry carnivore will enjoy you over noodles. Far safer to cling tight to mommy’s skirts,…
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