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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Play Speculates About Lives of Jewish Slave Owners
Recently there has been a spate of films, articles and plays about the Civil War and slavery, including “Lincoln” by Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” Few of these have mentioned Jews, and appropriately so since the numbers of Jews who owned slaves in the United States was relatively small. Nevertheless, the play “The…
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Get Ready for Jewish iSpirituality
Remember how you used to buy music in the old days? You would go to a store and purchase a plastic disk that an expert had recorded, sequenced and curated for you. Its style, and thus, secondarily, yours, was carefully thought out by an array of musicians, producers, art directors and marketing men (generally, men)….
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Drawn to Chabad Preschools, Stuffed Torahs and All
In our Brooklyn neighborhood, it’s said you should put your kid on a waiting list for child care while she is still in the amniotic sac. And when it comes to preschool, don’t hold your breath — unless, that is, you’ve got good connections. When it was our turn, I attended workshops on applying to…
The Latest
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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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Lights, Camera, Allen Ginsberg!
All photos: © 2012 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved. Somewhere, there is a snapshot of Allen Ginsberg and me sitting next to each other on a sofa — capturing us both in a rare moment of clean-shavenness — taken in 1981, when the poet visited Williams College for a reading. I don’t recall…
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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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