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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Film & TV In ‘The Rehearsal’ season 2, is Nathan Fielder serious?
The comedian is out to solve an epidemic of airplane crashes — will the world listen?
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L’Chaim a Bad Grammatical Error?
Marvin Kastenbaum has a question inspired by my column of October 21, which dealt with the practice, common among American Jews, of saying “l’Shana tova,” “For a good year,” instead of simply “Shana tova,” “A good year,” at Rosh Hashanah time. The column pointed out that l’shana tova is a shortening of l’shana tova tikateyvu,…
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Jerusalem’s Three Unauthorized Portraits
Jerusalem: The Biography By Simon Sebag Montefiore Knopf, 688 pages, $35 Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World By James Carroll Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 432 pages, $28 Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem By Carol Delaney Free Press, 336 pages, $26 A Google search for Jerusalem brings more than 13,000 news hits…
The Latest
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The Man Who Out-Sainted Einstein
James Franck, a Jewish scientist who was born in Hamburg, Germany, and was a co-winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics, is honored by The University of Chicago’s James Franck Institute and by the James Franck German-Israel Binational Program, hosted at five leading Israeli technical schools. Yet nothing commemorates the work Franck did inside…
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Books Write, Pray, Swim, Bike, Run
Earlier this week, Karol Neilsen wrote about the inefficiency of writing and how not to quit. Her new memoir, “Black Elephants,” was just released. Her 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…
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Books National Book Awards Look to Past and Future
“Take the time to be brief.” That’s the advice Edith Pearlman, one of five finalists for the National Book Award in fiction, wants to give to young writers. Pearlman’s book, “Binocular Vision,” did not win, perhaps because a collection of short stories has not won since Andrea Barrett’s collection, “Ship Fever,” was victorious in 1996….
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Emulate Our Ancestors
In his commentary on Chayei Sarah, Avrum Burg reflects on the life and nature of the Father of the Jewish people, Avraham. Burg points out that Avraham is not only pious and loving to God, but concerned for people of other nations. In addition to cultivating his divine relationship, he also wants to engage with…
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Books Q&A: Sara Y. Aharon on Jews of Afghanistan
“From Kabul to Queens: The Jews of Afghanistan and Their Move to the United States” by Sara Y. Aharon tells the story of Afghanistan’s Jewish community and its resettlement in the United States. The American Sephardi Federation held a book launch party November 3 at the Center for Jewish History. Before the event, Aharon, whose…
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Jewish Filmmaker Goes Uptown
Like most Jewish camp staff members over 21, Mark Blackman isn’t in it for the money. Blackman, 27, enjoys working with kids at Maryland’s Camp Airy, as well as taking walks near the mountains. He calls it “home to me.” But more than anything, Mark Blackman has returned almost every summer since 1998 because camp…
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Looking Back: November 25, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Nineteen-year-old Solomon Fruchtzweig and 20-year-old Leyzer Gleyzer, two known pimps from Sosnowiec, Poland, were arrested last week in Krakow for attempting to smuggle women from Germany to Egypt. After admitting their guilt, Fruchtzweig and Gleyzer fingered another resident, Chana Greenstein, who had promised the two men 100 rubles per…
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Books Never Quit on a Hill
On Monday, Karol Nielsen wrote about the inefficiency of writing. Her 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: A friend met an aspiring agent who had worked in publishing and recommended…
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Music Israel’s Gender Wars: A Week of Changes
It was small, low-key and the participants numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands. But a crowd of Israeli women took to the streets to speak out — or, more accurately, sing out — against the continuing attacks by religious extremists on women’s right to be seen and heard freely in the public square. The…
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Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
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Culture Did this Jewish literary titan have the right idea about Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling after all?
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