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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Evolutionary Biology After Auschwitz
May 20 marks the 10th anniversary of the death, at age 60, of evolutionary biologist and popular author Stephen Jay Gould. That’s an excellent excuse to relish seven paperback reprints of his work, out last fall from Harvard University Press. Included are “Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History” and “I Have Landed: The…
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Soccer Final Pits Jewish History Vs Jewish Oligarch
The most important game in the world this year, in America’s fastest growing team sport, takes place on Saturday May 19. And, because they don’t have a representative on the field, American Jews may feel a little left out. But, as Alan Rothenberg — who presided over the soccer World Cup in America in 1994…
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Books Author Blog: It Takes Two
Earlier this week, Dvora Meyers wrote about being an Orthodox Jewish gymnast. 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: As a writer, I’ve paid scant attention to the images that accompany my…
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Broiling Mojave Spawns ‘Angry Buddhist’
The Angry Buddhist By Seth Greenland Europa Editions, 400 pages, $16 This year, my wife and I celebrated Passover in the Mojave Desert. In a rented house on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, we had an intimate Seder with friends as the glaring light lowered into dusk. After the meal, we went outside…
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Taking a Second Look at Lillian Hellman
A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman By Alice Kessler-Harris Bloomsbury Press, 448 pages, $30 I don’t know that I have ever read this good a rescue job. Columbia historian Alice Kessler-Harris’s biography of dramatist and screenwriter Lillian Hellman made me feel like a stupid cliché: just another American who knows…
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Looking Back: May 25, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward Twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn resident Rose Moscowitz shot and killed her husband, Morris Moscowitz, after he tried to force her to become a prostitute. Moscowitz was initially a packer at a cigar factory, and her wages weren’t enough for her husband. He told her that he wanted her to sell her…
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Rabbinic Sister Act
There have been countless examples throughout Jewish history of children following parents into the rabbinate. There have even been instances in which two or more siblings, especially male ones, have chosen to become rabbis. But a family in which all three daughters get ordained? There have been no documented cases — until now. The Reform…
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Jews, the Left and the Rest
On September 10, 1964, sociologist and former journalist Daniel Bell opened a conference at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on “Jewish Participation in Social Progress Movements,” with a lecture on “Ideology and Social Movements.” Four years earlier, Bell argued in his landmark book, “The End of Ideology” (Free Press), that politics in the 1950s…
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Books Author Blog: Nice Jewish Girl on the Balance Beam
Dvora Meyers is the author of “Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess.” 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: When you tell someone that you used to do…
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Hunting the Whale
Last week’s column was about the Hebrew word tanakh, spelled with the letters taf, nun and kaf. This week, we’re down to taf and nun, which spell — but I’d better begin at the beginning. It all started with an attack of bursitis in my leg. What do you do when you have to rest…
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Whither Art Thou, American Male?
‘You’ve made me, like, the happiest girl alive!” Jason Segel’s character, Tom, gushes to his fiancé, Violet (Emily Blunt), in “The Five-Year Engagement,” which Segel co-wrote with director Nicholas Stoller, his writing partner for “The Muppets.” The latest in the Judd Apatow-produced comedy oeuvre, “Engagement” follows the couple’s bumpy road to nuptials, and feels like…
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