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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Barbra Streisand’s brand-new duet with Bob Dylan is a whole lot different than you might think
Though Dylan and Streisand's voices may seem ill-suited to each other, the two complement each other gorgeously on 'The Very Thought of You'
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What a Day For an Auto-Da-Fé
Am I a Jew?: Lost Tribes, Lapsed Jews, and One Man’s Search For Himself By Theodore Ross Hudson Street Press, 280 pages, $25.95 There are hooks, and then there is the first sentence of Theodore Ross’s new book, “Am I a Jew?” which grabs you by the lapels and makes you instantly uncomfortable and intensely…
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Composer Who Rocked the ‘Cradle’
A brilliantly researched new biography by Howard Pollack, “Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World,” out soon from Oxford University Press, is shining light on how one 20th-century American Jewish composer expressed his identity as a politically active leftist without abandoning Yiddishkeit. Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, who was born in Philadelphia in 1905 and died…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: The Nation-State
Daniel Gordis, recipient of the National Jewish Book Award and Senior Vice President and the Koret Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, discusses his forthcoming book “The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its Greatest Strength.” His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish…
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An Indelible Legacy
Three years ago, an elderly patient came into an emergency room in northern Israel complaining about chest pain. When a young doctor, Dana Doron, examined her, the woman pulled up her sleeve, pointed to a tattooed number on her arm and asked, “Do you know what is it?” She then proceeded to talk for an…
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Circassians Are Israel’s Other Muslims
Israel was born as a sanctuary for a people banished from their homeland, harassed in exile and ultimately subjected to mass murder. But there is more than one population here that meets this description. For, the Jewish state is home to another dispersed, insular and tradition-bound nation that has suffered through the trauma of exile…
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Many Mysteries of the Word ‘Mystery’
Forward reader Marvin Karp, inspired by my July 29 column about the word “macabre” and its possible connection with the Hebrew verb kavar, to bury (a connection that, as I observed, etymologists dismiss in favor of “Maccabee”), writes: “I have always sensed a connection between kavar and Italian cavare, to draw out, and scavare, to…
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Books Author Blog: Genetic Memory
Earlier this week, Doreen Carvajal wrote about trying to recover her family’s secret identity and how to unlock and preserve memories. 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: Earlier this summer, I…
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Crohn’s Is on the Rise Among Children
Last February, on a warm day in North Carolina, Dr. David Wohl entered the playground and saw his eight-year-old son, Zac, sitting motionless in the sandbox. “He looked like a 90-year-old guy who had fallen and couldn’t get up,” said Wohl, an AIDS expert and associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of North…
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Joe Kubert, Comic Artist Who Returned to Roots
Iconic comic book artist and writer Joe Kubert spent most of his life drawing brawny superheroes, lionhearted jungle men and rampaging dinosaurs. But at age 75, Kubert began a journey back to his roots, leading him to illustrate Warsaw Ghetto fighters and Holocaust survivors, as well as ethical mini-lessons for the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. Kubert,…
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Mysterious Childhood Diseases of Sephardim
If you were watching the BBC this spring, you would have seen one of Israel’s foremost geneticists debating the issue of marriage to close family members in Doha, Qatar — at the heart of the Arab world. At the Doha Debates Dr. Ohad Birk, who heads the Center for Human Genetics Research at the National…
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Books Dissecting America From the Inside
Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture Edited by Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson University of California Press, 304 pages, $29.95 “It’s terrible to arrive like us — after eight years of an existence that doesn’t deserve the name. I have grown older… Now comes the final station, which I can’t…
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