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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Torah Games and the Future of Learning
Rabbi Owen Gottlieb believes that the future of Jewish education is in games — both video and analog, like card and board games. Gottlieb, 38, is a doctoral candidate in education and Jewish studies at New York University and is the director and founder of ConverJent, which designs and develops games for Jewish learning and…
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Art of Ruth Abrams Deserves Second Look
In the 1940s and ’50s, the New York art world was in thrall to Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko: These were some of the big-name artists, and they made equally big paintings — emotionally charged canvases with curving lines, splotches of paint or oceanic fields of color. There was…
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Into the Wondrous ‘Woods’ Again
The sky is turning orange behind the black trees of Central Park, just like the set I remember from 25 years ago. I’m inside one of the city’s greatest works of art, the park, waiting to see another: the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.” I do remember that night in 1987 at the…
The Latest
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Jonathan Tropper Never Gave Up on Dream
When I stepped into the living room of Jonathan Tropper’s large house in the unpretentious Westchester suburb of New Rochelle, I had a nervous pause: Had I caught him at a bad moment? It looked like he had just moved in, and most of his furniture hadn’t yet arrived. The walls were bare, and there…
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Books Author Blog: Ideas Do Matter
In his last post, Daniel Gordis wrote about the discourse surrounding Israel as a conflict of ideas about the nation-state. His 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: In my previous blog, I…
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What a Day For an Auto-Da-Fé
Am I a Jew?: Lost Tribes, Lapsed Jews, and One Man’s Search For Himself By Theodore Ross Hudson Street Press, 280 pages, $25.95 There are hooks, and then there is the first sentence of Theodore Ross’s new book, “Am I a Jew?” which grabs you by the lapels and makes you instantly uncomfortable and intensely…
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Composer Who Rocked the ‘Cradle’
A brilliantly researched new biography by Howard Pollack, “Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World,” out soon from Oxford University Press, is shining light on how one 20th-century American Jewish composer expressed his identity as a politically active leftist without abandoning Yiddishkeit. Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, who was born in Philadelphia in 1905 and died…
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Books Author Blog: The Nation-State
Daniel Gordis, recipient of the National Jewish Book Award and Senior Vice President and the Koret Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, discusses his forthcoming book “The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its Greatest Strength.” His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish…
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An Indelible Legacy
Three years ago, an elderly patient came into an emergency room in northern Israel complaining about chest pain. When a young doctor, Dana Doron, examined her, the woman pulled up her sleeve, pointed to a tattooed number on her arm and asked, “Do you know what is it?” She then proceeded to talk for an…
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Circassians Are Israel’s Other Muslims
Israel was born as a sanctuary for a people banished from their homeland, harassed in exile and ultimately subjected to mass murder. But there is more than one population here that meets this description. For, the Jewish state is home to another dispersed, insular and tradition-bound nation that has suffered through the trauma of exile…
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Many Mysteries of the Word ‘Mystery’
Forward reader Marvin Karp, inspired by my July 29 column about the word “macabre” and its possible connection with the Hebrew verb kavar, to bury (a connection that, as I observed, etymologists dismiss in favor of “Maccabee”), writes: “I have always sensed a connection between kavar and Italian cavare, to draw out, and scavare, to…
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