Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Shining Light on American Complicity In Harboring Nazis
● Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals By Richard Rashke Delphinium Books, 622 pages, $29.95 There is horror to spare in Richard Rashke’s “Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals,” an engrossing cri de coeur about our country’s skewed post-World War II priorities. The…
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Hebrew School Gets Web Savvy
If you ask me (and, if I had to guess, many of my peers), there is nothing worse than Hebrew school. In the world of fun Jewish activities, with Yom Kippur fasting being a one and hooking up with Israeli soldiers on Birthright a 10, attending Hebrew school is a lowly three. On Sundays, when…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: Yiddish and Us
Earlier this week, Hannah S. Pressman wrote about when she first began to study Yiddish. 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 the series, please visit: The three of us waited expectantly and somewhat nervously in…
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Play Speculates About Lives of Jewish Slave Owners
Recently there has been a spate of films, articles and plays about the Civil War and slavery, including “Lincoln” by Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” Few of these have mentioned Jews, and appropriately so since the numbers of Jews who owned slaves in the United States was relatively small. Nevertheless, the play “The…
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Get Ready for Jewish iSpirituality
Remember how you used to buy music in the old days? You would go to a store and purchase a plastic disk that an expert had recorded, sequenced and curated for you. Its style, and thus, secondarily, yours, was carefully thought out by an array of musicians, producers, art directors and marketing men (generally, men)….
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Drawn to Chabad Preschools, Stuffed Torahs and All
In our Brooklyn neighborhood, it’s said you should put your kid on a waiting list for child care while she is still in the amniotic sac. And when it comes to preschool, don’t hold your breath — unless, that is, you’ve got good connections. When it was our turn, I attended workshops on applying to…
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One Nation Under God
Israel: A History By Anita Shapira Brandeis University Press, 528 pages, $35 Everyone wants to write a “history of Israel” — and many good, and some not so good, historians have done so. Martin Gilbert’s “Israel: A History” (not to be confused with the book we are reviewing here) is excellent for the beginner in…
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Lights, Camera, Allen Ginsberg!
All photos: © 2012 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved. Somewhere, there is a snapshot of Allen Ginsberg and me sitting next to each other on a sofa — capturing us both in a rare moment of clean-shavenness — taken in 1981, when the poet visited Williams College for a reading. I don’t recall…
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Books Author Blog: Yiddish and Me
Hannah S. Pressman is the co-editor, with Lara Rabinovitch and Shiri Goren, of “Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture.” She is the editor of stroumjewishstudies.org and affiliate faculty for the University of Washington’s Stroum Jewish Studies Program. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and…
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50 Years of Integration Began With Jewish Student’s Editorial
In 1962, a straight-A University of Alabama student named Melvin Meyer became a lightning rod of controversy when he published an editorial in the Crimson White, Alabama’s student newspaper, that countered the bigotry that was roiling the American south at the time. Meyer, a Jew from Starkville, Miss., was responding to the escalating tensions in…
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Redemption of the First Shorn
Forward reader Susan Rogol writes: “I receive many invitations to the ceremony of cutting the hair of a boy who has reached the age of 3, and I do not understand why it is referred to as an ‘upsherenish’ rather than an ‘upsheren.’ I always associate the Yiddish suffix “-nish” with something negative, as in…
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