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
-
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…
-
Books Author Blog: Hunting Family Ghosts
Doreen Carvajal’s first book, “The Forgetting River,” is about her search to recover her Catholic family’s hidden Sephardic Jewish roots in a mystical white pueblo on Spain’s southern frontier in Andalusia. 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…
-
Books Novelist Explores Love, Sorcery And The Talmud
With her new book, “Rav Hisda’s Daughter: Book 1, Apprentice,” Maggie Anton, author of the “Rashi’s Daughters” trilogy, unearths a different chapter of Jewish history, giving readers a peek into what life may have been like for a Jewish woman in 3rd century Babylonia. Weaving together research on the religious life and culture, the sociology…
The Latest
-
Get Help for Genetic Diseases
Here is a list of instutions that provide treatment and support and testing for Jewish genetic diseases. Bachmann-Strauss Dystonia & Parkinson Foundation 551 Fifth Avenue, Suite 520 New York, NY 10176 (212) 682-9900 Fax: (212) 682- 6156 www.dystonia-parkinson.org Bachmann-Strauss Dystonia & Parkinson Foundation funds scientific research seeking to understand the causes of and find potential…
-
Remembering Classmate David Rakoff
“Since you contacted me, I’ve been thinking a lot more about Bialik,” David Rakoff told me when I interviewed him two years ago for a piece I was writing for The Jerusalem Report. He was referring to Bialik Hebrew Day School, the Labor Zionist day school in Toronto we both attended as children. It was…
-
The Disappearing Yiddish Accent
They say that Yiddish has been dying for the past 200 years. Up until about 50 or 60 years ago, saying as much was kind of a crude bluff, but now it would be a lie to say that Yiddish hasn’t been severely diminished. According to UNESCO’s most recent list of endangered languages, Yiddish falls…
-
A Young Couple Tests Compatibility
The night Jeremy made me a raft and a river out of cardboard was when I first told him I loved him. By the time he proposed to me — after a scavenger hunt through New York City, on a boat in Central Park — we already knew we were going to get married. Like…
-
Our Favorite Heretic
Romantic rehabilitations of Jewish history’s most notorious heretic, Baruch Spinoza, seem — like Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) — to be without end. German romantics crowned this radical unbeliever a “God-intoxicated man.” Zionists claimed the excommunicant as an ideological ancestor of modern Jewish nationalism. The array of uses and misuses of Spinoza by…
-
Jewish Men in Middle of PSA Controversy
A year ago, Rabbi Jon Adland underwent genetic testing and discovered that he was positive for mutations on both BRCA1 and BRCA2 — the so-called breast cancer genes that raise the risk for breast and ovarian cancer, especially in Ashkenazi Jews, who are over 10 times more likely to have a BRCA mutation than those…
-
Cystic Fibrosis Knows No Borders
For generations, one Palestinian village just east of Jerusalem watched young adult after young adult lose their lives to a disabling disease. Eventually, the villagers learned that the previously unnamed killer was cystic fibrosis, a recessive genetic disorder that thickens mucous in the lungs and leads to life-threatening infections. But they failed to grasp that…
-
Being Jewish Is More Mind Than Matter
In the May 11 edition of the Forward, Jon Entine, founder and director of the Genetic Literacy Project at George Mason University, reviewed the book “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People,” by Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In the review, Entine summarized Ostrer’s major finding: Most, but…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News That whites-only, no Jews allowed Arkansas community is legal, says state’s attorney general. How?
- 2
Opinion Is starvation in Gaza really Israel’s fault? The facts are clear
- 3
Film & TV How Jon Stewart evolved on Israel — at least on ‘The Daily Show’
- 4
Opinion I have the answer to Jon Stewart’s toughest question about Israel
In Case You Missed It
-
Antisemitism Decoded How Trump is banning DEI at universities — except for Jews
-
Fast Forward Trump fired a commissioner over bad jobs numbers. Nixon targeted a ‘Jewish cabal’ at the same agency
-
Looking Forward That time my violin teacher tried to convert me to Christianity
-
Fast Forward UK’s largest Jewish group calls Israeli aid to Gaza ‘long overdue,’ months after disciplining members for criticizing Israel
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
