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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Nato Green, Offender of the Faith
Longtime San Francisco comedian Nathaniel Green, who recently moved to Brooklyn to start work as a writer on the FX show “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell,” was 11 years old when his parents first sent him to a synagogue. Susan and Jim Green, both schoolteachers and left-wing refugees from Chicago’s North Side, had found…
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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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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…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: Unlocking Memories
Earlier this week, Doreen Carvajal wrote about trying to recover her family’s secret identity. 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: Most everyone has a family tree. But how do you turn…
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Books Gregg Allman’s Ghost Writer
In a “grizzled, laconic drawl,” wrote Gregory Cowles in The New York Times, Gregg Allman’s recently published autobiography, “My Cross to Bear,” provides a “rambling backstage account of five decades with the Allman Brothers Band.” But it’s Allman’s Jewish co-author, Alan Light, who translated the rock legend’s rough-hewn tall tales of excess into “crisply ironed”…
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Without Tests, Heart Drug May Not Work
After his heart attack last December, Rabbi Daniel Siegel had two stents implanted in his blocked coronary arteries, and he started on a course of drugs to prevent further clots from forming. It was Siegel’s second heart attack in a little over five years, and each time his doctors prescribed him the same anti-clotting medicine:…
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Delays Plague Breast and Ovarian Cancer Research
Regulatory hurdles, along with dosing problems, have come to plague a new class of cancer drugs that showed highly encouraging results in early research. Those obstacles have frustrated breast and ovarian cancer patients who are carriers of cancer-causing mutations, particularly prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews, and for whom it was hoped the medicines would prove especially…
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Books Are You There, God? It’s Me, Rachel!
Intentions By Deborah Heiligman Knopf Books for Young Readers, 272 pages, $16.99 ‘I wish I were Amish,” says 16-year-old Rachel Greenberg. “Or a Hasidic Jew … All the rules are set for you, all the decisions made. Wouldn’t that be nice?” The narrator of Deborah Heiligman’s new young adult novel, “Intentions,” is neither Amish nor…
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Lost Jews of Africa
Filmmaker Laurence Gavron is on a journey to document lost Jewish tribes in Africa. The French-born Gavron, who has made Senegal her home since 1989, says she was immediately taken by the project, which she says combines her passion for Africa with the mystery of rediscovering Judaism. The film, titled “Black Jews, Juifs noir en…
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Hillels Stage College Drives To Save Lives
For Ohio University senior Lauren Kahn, the most significant test of her college career wasn’t a term paper or a final exam. It was a quick swab on the inside of her cheek her sophomore year, an easy, painless way to gather genetic information for a national database of potential bone marrow donors. On February…
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Genetic Screening Is Increasingly Complicated
One in four people of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is a carrier of at least one Jewish genetic disease. If both parents carry a recessive gene for the same disease, such as Tay-Sachs, each child has a 25% chance of having that disease. With such high risk factors in the Jewish community, many couples choose to…
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