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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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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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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Soviet Jews Win Right To Bake Passover Matzo
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, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 Years Ago 1913 The threats and danger of blood libels and pogroms are…
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Books The Last Jew of Boyle Heights
Earlier this week, Janice Steinberg wrote about “Djewess Unchained,” the Song of the Sea, and Yiddish inflected English and the audiobook version of her novel “The Tin Horse.” 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…
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Marc Chagall on Parade
A woman swathed in scarlet tulle dangles upside down, like an exhausted circus acrobat, gripping the bars of a swaying steel prism. Alongside her floats a bride — a trapeze artist in flowing white silk. A cow-headed man in a gray suit hangs on as if for dear life. The images recall the work of…
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Books Author Blog: Djewess Unchained
Earlier this week, Janice Steinberg wrote about the Song of the Sea and Yiddish inflected English and the audiobook version of her novel “The Tin Horse.” 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…
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The Best Jewish Director You’ve Never Heard Of
I’ve seen only two features written and directed by Michael Roemer — “Nothing But a Man” (1964), restored by the Library of Congress and “The Plot Against Harry” (made between 1966 and 1968, but released only in 1989 and recently revived at New York’s Film Forum ). Either of these would suffice to make him…
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Books Women’s Songs in Torah and ‘The Big Sleep’
Yesterday, Janice Steinberg wrote about Yiddish inflected English and the audiobook version of her novel, “The Tin Horse.” 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: Although I live in California, I don’t…
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These Objects Are Closer Than They Appear
One of the seminal stories in the history of art is that of Marcel Duchamp, a French artist who, in 1913, took a bicycle wheel, mounted it on a stool, and called it art. “Readymades” was the term Duchamp later coined for the everyday objects — bottle racks, shovels, even urinals — that he would…
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