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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Books
Author Blog: Montefiore’s Ramsgate
Earlier this week, Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award Winner Dr. Abigail Green wrote about the making of a good biography and traveling in the footsteps of Montefiore. 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,…
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How Yossi Lost Jagger
It’s been almost 10 years since “Yossi and Jagger” came out (no pun intended) to rave reviews. The movie, of course, is Israeli director Eytan Fox’s romantic drama about two male soldiers who fall into a doomed love at the front in Lebanon. The subject matter, a gay relationship within the context of the Israeli…
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Where’s ‘Wally’?
Sometime in the mid-1990s I was asked by a Jewish arts organization to arrange an art trip to Europe — preferably to look at modern and contemporary art. I immediately suggested that we visit German art museums, since there are so many of them and they have been so active in those fields of collecting…
The Latest
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Remembering Mother in Graphic Form
Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me By Sarah Leavitt Skyhorse Publishing, 128 pages, $14.95 Early on in Sarah Leavitt’s heartbreaking account of her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease comes what I think of as The Conversation. It’s the moment a family needs but at the same time dreads, when the reality everyone…
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Coming to Africa
When I heard that a West African-Israeli collaborative venture called the Touré-Raichel Collective was going to be performing this month at City Winery, an upscale venue in lower Manhattan, I had serious misgivings. Was I curious? You bet. Was I optimistic? Not in the least. My wariness had nothing to do with the band’s hyphenated…
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Vidal: A Jewish Soldier of the Hair Salons
The hairstylist Vidal Sassoon, who died on May 9, reportedly of leukemia, was more than just a fashion legend. Born in London in 1928 of Ukrainian-Greek Jewish background, Sassoon created an architectonically geometric updating of the short women’s haircut known as the “bob” for such 1960s celebrities as the English model Twiggy, dress designer Mary…
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Books Author Blog: Jewish Journeys
Earlier this week, Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award Winner Dr. Abigail Green wrote about the making of a good biography. 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: For the past 10 years…
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Must-See Summer Festivals in Israel
Tourists heading to Israel hit an all-time high in the first quarter of 2012. From January through March, 637,200 tourists arrived in Israel, up 2% compared with the same period last year. While part of the uptick is due to factors out of Israel’s control, such as economic recovery, large numbers of tourists are being…
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Books Etgar Keret Gets Streetwise
While Etgar Keret, the Israeli novelist and screenwriter, was in the country to promote his latest book “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories,” he went for a walk with the Forward’s Dan Friedman. Keret — the writer The New York Times called a “genius” and the man Salman Rushdie referred to as “the voice…
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Man in Search of God
Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine By Eric Weiner Twelve, 368 pages, $26.99 I’ll be honest: I normally hate books like this — memoirs of spiritual tourism, jauntily retold by trustworthy but neurotic narrators who are careful never to be more knowledgeable than the reader. I have read about two dozen of these…
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Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Once upon a time, there were only a few ways to rest your head during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There were kibbutzim — which often required a week or month or year of volunteer work. There were campgrounds, though they required gear. There was the elderly cousin’s couch in central Tel Aviv, but…
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