Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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X-Rated Dispute in Knesset
This week’s column, you should be warned, is X-rated. Don’t blame me for it. You can blame firebrand Anastasia Michaeli and gasoline-tongued Ahmad Tibi, both members of Israel’s Knesset. Soviet-born Michaeli — an ex-telecommunications engineer and fashion model who married an Israeli, immigrated to Israel in 1998 and converted to Judaism — belongs to Foreign…
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What’s So Jewish About Test Prep?
In the early days of Princeton Review, when roughly half of the test prep company’s employees were Jewish, it was often Jews vs. goyim in the annual football game. “They were taller, but we were faster,” said John Katzman, co-founder with Adam Robinson. Katzman also recalled “Talmudic” discussions on how to schedule tutoring sessions around…
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A Little Story About A Coat
Translated by Miriam Hoffman and Beverly Koenigsberg This story originally appeared in the Forverts of February 20, 1987. You really need to find a way to cope with our harsh northern winters. Foremost, Lady Luck must help you land a good winter coat, and to my delight she did just that for me last year….
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The Weakness of God
Beshalach — When He Had Let the People Go Exodus 13:17–17:16 At the sea, after the danger of drowning has passed, after Israel has been saved and six hundred of Pharaoh’s elite charioteers has drowned in the sea, the scripture sums up the essence of the ancient faith in this fashion: “And the people feared…
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Books Returning to Crown Heights
Matthew Shaer is the author of “Among Righteous Men: A Tale of Vigilantes and Vindication in Hasidic Crown Heights.” His blog posts are being featured this week 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: I did not…
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Conservatives Have Jewish Values, Too
Jewish conservatives continue to spend significant amounts of effort and money to swing American and Israeli politics to the far right. Most visible is gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson, whose funding of Israeli media affected the 2009 Israeli election and who is now spending a fortune to equate American “support for Israel” with support for Israel’s…
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Aussie Novelist Takes on Civil Rights
The Street Sweeper By Elliot Perlman Riverhead Books, 617 pages, $28.95 The book that turned Elliot Perlman into a writer was the only book in the house that his liberal mother didn’t want him to read. Her reasons were pragmatic, not philosophical: As a high school English teacher, she was preparing “One Day in the…
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Poet Laureate of the Airwaves
Norman Corwin, the writer and radio producer who died on October 18 at age 101, was often dubbed the “poet laureate of radio” by journalists, but he was rather more than that. Born in an East Boston tenement to parents of Russian-Hungarian Jewish origin, Corwin inspired the following paean of praise from one of his…
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Student Journals Build Bridges
The enemy, Sami Adwan believes, “is the person whose story you haven’t heard.” So, together with his American colleague, Robert Vogel, he has embarked on a mission to make sure Israeli and Palestinian school children hear each other’s stories. Adwan, a professor of education from Bethlehem University, and Vogel, from Philadelphia’s La Salle University, are…
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Jewish Schools Use iPad
Toward the end of his life, Apple’s visionary leader, Steve Jobs, was visited by another computer innovator, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The conversation turned to the future of education. As related in Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Jobs, both men agreed that computers had made surprisingly little impact on schools. “Computers and mobile devices would have…
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Jumping From Nobel Page to American Stage
The current production in New York City’s legendary LaMama Experimental Theatre Club’s 50th anniversary season is a duo of one-acts from Tel Aviv’s Nephesh Theatre, each based on a short story by a Nobel Prize-winning Jewish writer — the first, “Gimpel the Fool,” based on the celebrated Isaac Bashevis Singer story; the second, based on…
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