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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The Yiddish Quran
There was an unusual event in Haifa the other day. Muhammad Sharif Odeh, the leader of the Israeli community of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, announced the 25th anniversary of an Ahmadiyya-sponsored translation into Yiddish of selections from the Quran. Called by Haifa’s Jewish mayor, Yona Yahav, the “Reform Jews of Islam,” the Ahmadiyyas, who…
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A Womb With a Point of View
Vagina: A New Biography By Naomi Wolf Ecco/HarperCollins 400 pages, $27.99 Vaginas are getting a lot of ink in the news these days. Everyone seems to have an opinion about them, especially folks who do not have one. In August, Rep. Todd Akin, a Missouri Republican, made his infamous comments about the vagina’s seemingly supernatural…
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Books Author Blog: The Real Flavor of the Streets
Earlier this week, Steve Stern wrote about embarking on a quixotic journey and his decision to teach creative writing in Vilnius. 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: There’s a district in…
The Latest
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Music Lisa Loeb’s Kids’ Jew-ish Names
Back in her ‘90s heyday, Lisa Loeb was responsible for the tortoiseshell-cateye-glasses trend, and of course for being the first-ever unsigned artist to have a No. 1 single. (That would be the super-addictive “Stay” from the “Reality Bites” soundtrack.) Now that Loeb is a semi-retired wife and mom, she’s setting a different kind of trend….
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Books Author Blog: Illusions and Remembering
Yesterday, Steve Stern wrote about his decision to teach creative writing in Vilnius. 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: I liked to sit sipping coffee in the tall kitchen window of…
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Books The Feminist Canon Just Got Really Good
Like many Americans, particularly those who share my gender, I’ve spent a good deal of my spring and summer immersed in new books by (and mostly for) women. But I want to take a break from buzzing about the erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the creepy thriller “Gone Girl” to talk about two…
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Simon Rich Is Charming as His Life
By just about any measure, Simon Rich, 28, has had an enviable career. Son of famed New York Times columnist and theater critic Frank Rich, stepson of author Alex Witchel, younger brother of novelist Nathaniel Rich, he attended New York’s prestigious Dalton School, then went on to Harvard, where he edited the famed Harvard Lampoon…
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The Gospel According to Feuding Academics
The Jewish Gospels By Daniel Boyarin The New Press, 224 pages, $21.95 The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other By Peter Schäfer Princeton University Press, 370 pages, $35 As someone who writes in the academic world and the worlds of journalism, activism and the popular press, I’ve been painfully aware of some…
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Books Author Blog: A Yiddishist in Vilnius
Steve Stern’s most recent book, “The Book of Mischief,” is now available. 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: I had fun in Vilnius, despite my low tolerance for fun. Not to…
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The Jews Who Plumbed Hitler’s Brain
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts By Daniel Pick Oxford University Press, 368 pages, $35 More than 20 years ago, Neal Gabler declared that Hollywood was the creation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In his remarkable book “An Empire of Their Own,” Gabler in fact suggested that the Meyers…
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Good Night, Vienna
Vienna-born potter Lucie Rie, who is the subject of Emmanuel Cooper’s biography “Lucie Rie: Modernist Potter,” shows how a Jewish artist can express Yiddishkeit in creativity despite repeated assimilations. Rie, who lived from 1902 to 1995, was the daughter of Dr. Benjamin Gomperz, an ear, nose and throat specialist and a friend of Sigmund Freud….
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