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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A Nebbish Is Born
Last week’s column left you hanging in suspense about the Yiddish word nebekh, whose last consonant is pronounced like the “ch” in “Bach.” Forward reader Howard Schranz, you will recall, spoke of having it “thrown his way” after his father’s death when he was a child, and he wanted to know whether it meant, as…
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Three-Timing Jewish Hubby Faces the Music
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 illluminating, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 Years Ago 1913 New York City cigar maker Charles Weiss may not look…
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The Assassination of R.B. Kitaj
‘Jewish cultural life with all its disasters, brilliance, learning, evasions and daring has conducted me and my art like an excited zombie or Golem,” the painter R.B. Kitaj wrote in a commentary to his early painting “The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg,” a stark collagelike canvas named for the Jewish revolutionary leader who was assassinated in…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: Making It Human
Eric L. Muller has been blogging here all week. 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: The question that I am exploring in this series of blog posts is what a “concentration…
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Jonathan Sacks Offers Strident Defense of Faith
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning By Jonathan Sacks Doubleday, 384 pages, $28.95 Jonathan Sacks, whose long tenure as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth expires in March, when he turns 65, has for decades been an inspiration to many Modern Orthodox Jews, who…
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Books Author Blog: Behind Barbed Wire
Yesterday, Eric L. Muller asked: What does a concentration camp look like? 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: My new book “Colors of Confinement” presents dozens of stunning Kodachrome photographs of…
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It’s Not Easy Being a ‘Rabbi’s Daughter’
When we think of children who carry the burden of having famous parents, we often think of the offspring of movie stars or politicians. But in the Religious Zionist sector of Israeli society, being the child of a prominent rabbi comes with some very heavy baggage. Filmmaker Racheli Wasserman, herself the daughter of such a…
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Books What Does a Concentration Camp Look Like?
Eric L. Muller is Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law and director of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Faculty Excellence. His newest book, “Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II,” is…
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Books The Genesis of ‘The Jewish Furrier’
Earlier, Cliff Graubart wrote about higher education and his father and Pat Conroy. 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: Carol Conroy was browsing the poetry section when my parents Sigmund and…
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German Travelogue Unveils Stubborn Anti-Semitism
An unusual book was published recently in Germany: a travelogue that reveals, through hundreds of interviews in nearly 40 cities and towns in Germany, a disturbing obsession with the Jews, as well as outright anti-Semitism, among the German population today. The book, “Allein Unter Deutschen” (“Alone Among Germans”), published by the European publisher, Suhrkamp, is…
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Abbreviate This!
Howard Schranz wants to know the origin and exact meaning of the Yiddish word nebekh. “When I was 11,” he writes, “after my father, a”h, died, I heard a lot of nebekh thrown my way. I know it meant something like, ‘It’s pitiful,’ and I quickly tired of being called that. Show some sympathy if…
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