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
Author Blog: The Golden Child
Lauren Grodstein’s books include the novels “The Explanation for Everything,” “A Friend of the Family,” and “Reproduction is the Flaw of Love” and the story collection “The Best of Animals.” Lauren teaches creative writing at Rutgers-Camden, where she helps administer the college’s MFA program. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of…
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As Teens Defect from Shul, Congregations Find Ways to Revamp Programming
At Reform Temple Beth Shalom in Needham, Mass., high school students can go on weekend wilderness adventure trips in lieu of attending Hebrew school. At North Shore Congregation Israel, a Reform synagogue in the Chicago area, they can join a musical group where they jam together — and prepare to lead an alternative High Holy…
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Israel Museum’s Herod Show is King of Exhibitions
Rome and Jerusalem, the birthplaces of modern Western civilization, share an infamously bloody history. The destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman general Titus in 70 C.E. effectively excised Jerusalem from the world’s annals for almost 2,000 years, while securing its place in prayer books. In our collective memory, the two seem eternally at…
The Latest
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Sprinter Marty Glickman Left Anti-Semitism in the Dust
‘I don’t remember walking as a young person,” Marty Glickman once said. “I always ran.” “Glickman,” the sometimes inspiring, always fawning, HBO documentary about the life and times of the Olympian track star and legendary radio broadcaster, starts off fast, as well. The film takes on Glickman’s long life, quickly reaching the most notorious moment…
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Hebrew School Has Nowhere To Go But Up
About 40 years ago in Chicago, halfway through Hebrew school class, my teacher realized I was hiding under her desk, making faces at other students, trying to make them laugh. She sent me instantly to the principal’s office. The thing is, I was one of the “good kids” who rarely disrupted class and seemed genuinely…
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David Coleman, the Most Influential Education Figure You’ve Never Heard Of
As a boy growing up in downtown Manhattan with a college president for a mother and psychiatrist for a father, David Coleman often had lively and lacerating dinner table conversations. “My parents, while both working, were home every night at dinner,” said Coleman, now 43. The family wasn’t satisfied with easy repartee. If Coleman went…
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For One Teen, Getting a Jewish Education Was a Form of Rebellion
Someone once asked Pamela Anderson — the regular Playboy centerfold and “Baywatch” star — what she thought her two sons would be like when they grew up. She joked that in order to rebel against her, they would probably become accountants. Though the quote seemed like a throwaway comment, it creeps back into my mind…
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How To Recognize a Secret Spanish Jew by His Marrano Accent
Dr. William Greenfield of Libertyville, Ill., asks: “Are you familiar with George Borrow’s identifying a living marrano in 19th-century Spain by his speech pattern? It’s in his book ‘The Bible in Spain.’” Never having heard of George Borrow, I went to the Internet and found a digital copy of “The Bible in Spain.” A fascinating…
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Catching up With Tuvia Tenenbom
Last year, journalist, playwright and critic Tuvia Tenenbom made quite an impression with the publication of “Allein Unter Deutschen” (“Alone Among Germans”; English-language title: “I Sleep in Hitler’s Room”). A frank and funny portrayal of modern-day Germany and the persistence of anti-Semitism there, the book rankled publishers, editors and journalists, while vaulting onto Der Spiegel’s…
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Have Judaica Will Travel — Through Dixie
When Rachel Jarman Myers, a Jewish educator, works with children in Jackson, Miss., she typically asks the students if they know any Jewish people. Sometimes, one child raises a hand. But when she specifies that the person cannot be Myers herself, the child’s hand almost always goes back down. The Jewish population in Mississippi has…
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The Midrashic Achievement of Poet John Hollander
The American Jewish poet John Hollander died on August 17 at age 83. At a 1990s New York literary gathering, I praised his translation of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Golem.”. Hollander demurred modestly, not adding as he did to the poet Edwin Honig in 1985: “My mother’s family traditionally believes that my…
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