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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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…
The Latest
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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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Books Author Blog: Historians, Biographers
Dr. Abigail Green is the author of “Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero.” 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: What makes a good biography? I thought about this question a lot…
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Looking Back: May 11, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward A Philadelphia sweatshop exploded into chaos as two sewing machine operators got into a vicious fight. As workers received their bundles of piecework in the morning at Dotkin’s shop on South Street, Louis Getor thought that Samuel Ravitz’s bundle was bigger than his, so he began complaining about it,…
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Acronyms and the Bible
In response to my column of two weeks ago in which I objected to the use by Jews of the term “Old Testament,” several of you have expressed the opinion that the best alternative to it is “Hebrew Bible.” Miriam Segall of Minneapolis, on the other hand, wants to get even more Jewish that that….
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Adam Yauch and the Adolescent Sublime
Of all the Beastie Boys, I had the least attachment to Adam Yauch. It’s important to say this at the beginning because it’s impossible to talk about the Beastie Boys as individuals without talking about the group, and it’s impossible to talk about them as a band — to talk about their music — without…
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