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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Author Jennifer Gilmore’s New Novel Confronts the Mother of All Struggles
● The Mothers By Jennifer Gilmore Scribner, 288 pages, $26 In her novel “The Mothers,” Jennifer Gilmore has written the book all women of a certain age going through the infertility cycles of hell long to hand to any member of the fertile world who asks that innocent but searing question: So, are you pregnant…
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Books Gary Shteyngart Wrote a Memoir
The next work from Gary Shteyngart, the novelist known for books such as “Absurdistan” and “Super Sad True Love Story,” will be a memoir, The New York Times reports. The book will be titled “Little Failure” and will be released in January 2014 by Random House. According to Shteyngart’s editor, David Ebershoff, the book will…
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Books Writing a Novel in Two Cultures
Earlier this week, Helene Wecker wrote about dorkdom and writing while Jewish. Enter to win a copy of her debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, here. 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,…
The Latest
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Books The Wayward Moon
Our lives can change in an instant, which is exactly what happens to Rahel bat Yair, a 17-year-old girl about to be engaged to be married. Mere minutes after her father’s enemy arrives at her home as she gets ready to meet her betrothed, the sheltered teenager is forced to flee and assume a new…
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Stuart Nadler’s Story of Interracial Love Explores Tensions in Jewish Families
● Wise Men By Stuart Nadler Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur, 352 pages, $25.99 In Stuart Nadler’s debut novel, a Jewish boy named Hilly, whose father has suddenly become enormously wealthy, falls in love with a black girl named Savannah whom he barely knows. The encounter, in 1950s suburbia, has far-reaching ramifications that will haunt Hilly for…
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Books The Most Jewish Thing I Do
Enter to win a copy of Helene Wecker’s debut novel “The Golem and the Jinni” here. 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: When I started looking through the extensive and awe-inspiring…
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Nothing Beat the Spa for Wealthy 19th Century Jews
The upper crust of Eastern and Central European Jews in the 19th century had a solution when their lives became too stressful. They opted for health cures in spa towns, especially at one of three tourist paradises built around local natural mineral waters full of dissolved carbon dioxide that were considered particularly salubrious. In the…
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Books Giving a Voice — and a Name — to Noah’s Wife
These days, we attend more closely to the role of our biblical matriarchs. But while Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel occupy the spotlight, most of us haven’t thought much about another female antecedent: Noah’s wife. Rebecca Kanner’s new novel, “Sinners and the Sea,” imagines the experiences of that woman. In a recent interview with The…
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Is Rise of Jewish Fundamentalism Endangering Israeli Democracy?
● The War Within: Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Threat to Democracy and the Nation Yuval Elizur and Lawrence Malkin Overlook Press, 224 pages, $26.95 As my 17-year-old son said, “This book could double as Yair Lapid’s Tanach.” And he’s not wrong. One of the many merits of Yuval Elizur’s and Lawrence Malkin’s “The War Within: Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox…
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How Adam Kadmon Made the Leap From The Kabbalah to Italian Television
Just who is the mysterious and much talked about Italian television personality and conspiracy theorist Adam Kadmon, who always appears on TV with a mask to hide his identity? Is he an imaginative Italian investigative journalist? The descendant, as he claims to be, of an ancient family endowed with mystical powers, stemming from seven androids…
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Yitzhak Ben Zvi Memorialized
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 and edifying clippings from the Jewish past. 100 years ago 1913 Walery Waszkewicz, a Polish resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was murdered…
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