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: Transforming the Magical
Earlier this week, Baruch and Judy Sterman wrote about their obsession with blue. Their 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: We were sitting in an upscale café in Northern Tel Aviv waiting…
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Netanyahu Sets Meeting With Peres To Request Extension in Forming Government
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with President Shimon Peres to request an extension in forming a government. Their meeting was scheduled for Saturday night at the end of Shabbat, which is the deadline for forming a government. Under law, Netanyahu can request an up to two-week extension, which Peres already has said he…
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Yo La Tengo, In Media Res, QED?
We are born into the middle of life and it’s only when our powers to affect our surroundings are fading that we begin to glimpse where it is that we were, and what we might have done. Though “Ohm,” the opening track of “Fade,” starts with an insistent beat that recalls Steve Reich’s “Different Trains”…
The Latest
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Tending Bar and Talking Faith With Jewish Drinking Columnist Rosie Schaap
● Drinking With Men: A Memoir By Rosie Schaap Riverhead Books, 272 pages, $26.95 As Rosie Schaap remembers it, in 1987, at the age of 16, she took the advice of her guidance counselor and dropped out of high school to follow the Grateful Dead. She sold beads and tie-dyed T-shirts to support herself, went…
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Books Can Israel Help American Jews Recall Forgotten Heroes?
Earlier this week, M. M. Silver wrote about the riches in Louis Marshall’s archive. His 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: Now that my previous blog post established to everyone’s complete satisfaction…
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Books Sami Rohr Prize Finalists Announced
The Jewish Book Council has announced the finalists for this year’s Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The $100,000 prize is one of the largest literary awards in the world and recognizes emerging writers who examine the Jewish experience. It is given for fiction and non-fiction in alternating years. This year’s fiction finalists include Shani…
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Books Ben Schrank and Joshua Furst Debate Judaism and Art
Ben Schrank and author and frequent Forward contributor Joshua Furst met up at The Brooklyn Inn with the intention of drinking some beer and discussing fiction, Brooklyn and their complicated relationships with Jewishness. Schrank recently published his wise, big-hearted new novel, “Love Is a Canoe.” Since much of the story revolves around publishing and the…
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Books Author Blog: Obsession in Blue
Baruch and Judy Sterman’s “The Rarest Blue: The Remarkable Story of an Ancient Color Lost to History and Rediscovered” is now available. Their 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: We admit it,…
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What Has He Done To Deserve This?
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked By James Lasdun Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $25 A small boy flees across a bridge. Assassins follow, begging for a taste of his blood to eat with dessert: “to top off the honey.” Eventually, the boy surrenders his head, submitting to his beheaders’ crazed illogic:…
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‘Yip’ Harburg’s All-American Lyrics Came With a Heaping Helping of Yiddishkeit
Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist By Harriet Hyman Alonso Wesleyan Univeristy Press, 332 pages, $28.95 The tragic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” the idealistic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the raucous “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” were all co-written by the same American Jewish lyricist, E. Y. Harburg (1896–1981), and all owe…
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Books American Jewry’s Top 100 List
M. M. Silver is a modern Jewish history scholar at Max Stern College of Emek Yezreel in Israel. His newest book, “Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America: A Biography,” is now available. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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Yiddish ווי ייִדישע קינדער־ליטעראַטור האָט געזאָלט העלפֿן קינדער פֿאַרשטיין די וועלטHow Yiddish children’s literature aimed to help kids make sense of the world
די אַמאָליקע קינדערביכער האָבן אָפּגעשפּיגלט כּלערליי פּאָליטישע וויזיעס און אויך אַ נײַעם פֿאַרשטאַנד פֿון קינדער און משפּחה־לעבן.
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