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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Spinoza of Wall Street
Bento’s Sketchbook By John Berger Pantheon, 176 pages, $28.95 Can a mass of ordinary, well-meaning people, without great wealth or political power, radically change the structure of the society in which they live? It’s a question that has been much on the world’s mind this past year. In Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, autocratic rulers and…
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Books Being Compared to Philip K. Dick
Earlier this week, Lavie Tidhar wrote about his fixation on historical figures. 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: Being compared to Philip K. Dick is great, especially when…
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Vayeshev — And Jacob Dwelt
Genesis 37:1–40:23 Jacob and His Two Firstborns, Judah and Joseph There is something reassuringly stable and secure in the notion of “dwelling,” the verb that gives this week’s portion its name. It has an air of permanence, of rootedness, unlike more tentative concepts such as sojourning or abiding. The same is true of the Hebrew…
The Latest
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Gimme Some Old Time Gossip
Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit By Joseph Epstein Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 256 pages, $25 The only book I would rather review than a treatise on gossip is a history of pornography: Both promise all the thrill of the source material with only half the need to smuggle the book inside a magazine on the subway. Or…
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Discovering Israel’s Not-So-Old History
When American Jews think of the Israeli landscape, what come to mind are ancient ruins, contemporary settlement blocs and walls of all sorts. But as I recently discovered on a whirlwind trip, the situation on the ground is far more complex than that. Buildings whose history stretches back to pre-state days are being given a…
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‘Minus 16’ Is Plus for Ailey
‘Don’t make it look pretty,” Danielle Agami said as she directed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater during a recent rehearsal. “It’s not about the construction of beauty, it’s about the sensation. Every gesture, posture, and breath is beautiful. Just let your body be.” Agami, a former member of Batsheva Dance Company, spent November at…
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Books Historical Figure Fixation
Lavie Tidhar’s most recent novel is “Osama” (PS Publishing). 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 might be obsessed with historical figures. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing. But…
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A Sneak Preview of Itzhak Perlman
Itzhak spoke to Yitzchok in Hebrew. Hankus spoke to Yitzchok in Yiddish. The conductor made puns in English with a heavy accent that is Australian and South African. And this all happened in the studio where Bruce Springsteen recorded “Born To Run” and Madonna laid down her vocal tracks for “Like a Virgin.” We’re talking,…
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Cheers! We’re Not Poisoned — Or Are We?
Two interesting comments have come from readers about [my November 25 column][1] on the Jewish toast “l’chaim,” which I traced back to a medieval custom, still practiced by Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews, that is connected to the Kiddush, the traditional Sabbath and holiday blessing over wine. The first of these, from Harold Zvi Slutzkin…
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To Understand and Equate, Passionately
It says something about the fraught history of North African Jewry that one of its most vivid authors of today was inspired to write a reminiscence of her youth not by dipping a Proustian madeleine into her tea, but by almost being crushed by a train. Colette Fellous, who was born in Tunis in 1950…
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Looking Back: December 16, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Haym Soloveitchik, otherwise known as the Brisker Rov, is one of the best-known scholars among contemporary rabbis. Considered one of Jewish law’s top authorities, people turn to him from all over the world with their legal queries. For the young generation, Soloveitchik is regarded as a fanatic who is…
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