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: The Future of the Past
Yehuda Kurtzer is the author of “Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past.” 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 a recent Commentary article, Jack Wertheimer once again takes on the…
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Should Israel Have Gone With Yiddish?
Murray Lefkowitz of Merion Station, Pa., writes a letter stating his opinion that it “may have been an unfortunate choice” that Hebrew became the language of the state of Israel, since “Yiddish was the more common tongue for almost all Jews prior to 1948.” The claim that Yiddish, not Hebrew, was the real national language…
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American Words, Israeli Songs
Listening to the new album “Robin” by acclaimed actress and singer-songwriter Efrat Ben Zur, you wouldn’t know that the songs on it were sung by an Israeli artist, or that they were composed to the poems of 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson. But it is precisely this serendipitous combination that makes the album so captivating….
The Latest
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Bible Codes a Lie That Won’t Die
Recently, I had the pleasure of teaching at Limmud FSU (Former Soviet Union), the version of the wildly successful international learning conference geared toward Russian-speaking Jews. Held at a hotel outside Princeton University, the conference’s theme was science, with an emphasis on Albert Einstein, and the cultural and political sessions reflected the generally rational, secular…
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Looking Back: June 8, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward A Bronx courtroom exploded when Netty Pavlovitch jumped over the barrier and attacked the defendant in the case, 58 year-old Joseph Capischi, who is on trial for seducing a 14 year-old Jewish girl: Pavlovitch’s daughter, Stella. Pavlovitch had to be restrained by a number of police officers, who barely…
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Her Husband Is Not a Mensch
In April 1907, a frazzled Forverts reader wrote in to the newspaper’s advice column, the Bintel Brief, entreating the editor “not to write which city this comes from.” Her life, she wrote, is terrible. Her husband is “truly not a mensch.” What should she do? Liana Finck reimagines this story in graphic form as part…
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Making Sense of Anti-Semitism
A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism By Phyllis Goldstein Facing History and Ourselves, 432 pages, $17.95 Historian Victor Tcherikover used to say that there are few things that have a history of 2,000 years. Anti-Semitism is one of them. And indeed, in our own day, the taxonomy of anti-Semitism yet includes religious and secular…
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Books Author Blog: Stumbling Stones
Leslie Maitland is the author of Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed. 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: . In 1989 I accompanied…
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Peace Process? Fuhgeddaboudit!
The daily English edition of the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz, which also appears in an Internet version, has always struck me as a prodigious feat of translation. Day after day — or, more precisely, night after night — a battery of anonymous translators, working like galley slaves under enormous time pressure, takes the Hebrew paper, itself…
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Sumptuous Feast for Jewish Studies
Gender and Jewish History Edited by Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore Indiana University Press, 428 pages, $27.95 Imagine sitting down for delicious tapas at a long table with a group of old friends. The flavors are nuanced and varied, while the conversation is lively, provocative and deeply engaging. Reading “Gender and Jewish History,”…
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Books Day Schools and the End of the Melting Pot
Earlier this week, Jonathan Krasner discussed his use of the word “boys” and the magic of summer camp. 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: I met Peter Beinart in 1999 when…
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