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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Yoshke of Nazareth
Henry Sapoznik, director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin, has taken me to task for writing in my July 27 column that the song “Yoshke Fort Avek” was written by the Yiddish performer Aaron Lebedeff during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. Lebedeff, Mr. Sapoznik writes, had nothing to do with…
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Books Author Blog: Self-Surveillance
In this week’s installment of the Visiting Scribe, Joshua Cohen and Justin Taylor exchanged ideas around book promotion, materials of writing, and the devolution of the author. Read Part I here and Part II here.Their blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog…
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Tangled Up in Jews
It’s deeply ironic that Tanglewood, which is currently celebrating its 75th anniversary as the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and one of America’s largest music festivals — was essentially the creation of Jews in a place largely resentful of their presence. During the 1930s in America, hostility to Jews was common, especially in…
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Reb Shlomo Meets Nigeria
Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Shlomo Carlebach are not an obvious pairing. The first was a Nigerian musician, political activist and devotee of traditional Yoruba religion who married 27 wives simultaneously, was jailed for his aggressive criticism of the Nigerian government and died of AIDS after a lifetime of inspired rabble-rousing. The second was an American…
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Marvin Hamlisch Changed My Life
When I first heard the music from “A Chorus Line,” I immediately declared it the best musical ever written. This was perhaps a bold claim for a 9 year old to make: I didn’t know who Marvin Hamlisch was, or that the musical had won him the Pulitzer Prize, or that it had been the…
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Books Author Blog: Quality Grumbling
In this installment of the Visiting Scribe,Joshua Cohen and Justin Taylor exchange ideas around book promotion, materials of writing, and the devolution of the author. Read Part One of their exchange here. Their blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For…
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