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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Rabbinic Sister Act
There have been countless examples throughout Jewish history of children following parents into the rabbinate. There have even been instances in which two or more siblings, especially male ones, have chosen to become rabbis. But a family in which all three daughters get ordained? There have been no documented cases — until now. The Reform…
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Jews, the Left and the Rest
On September 10, 1964, sociologist and former journalist Daniel Bell opened a conference at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on “Jewish Participation in Social Progress Movements,” with a lecture on “Ideology and Social Movements.” Four years earlier, Bell argued in his landmark book, “The End of Ideology” (Free Press), that politics in the 1950s…
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Books Author Blog: Nice Jewish Girl on the Balance Beam
Dvora Meyers is the author of “Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess.” 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: When you tell someone that you used to do…
The Latest
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Hunting the Whale
Last week’s column was about the Hebrew word tanakh, spelled with the letters taf, nun and kaf. This week, we’re down to taf and nun, which spell — but I’d better begin at the beginning. It all started with an attack of bursitis in my leg. What do you do when you have to rest…
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Whither Art Thou, American Male?
‘You’ve made me, like, the happiest girl alive!” Jason Segel’s character, Tom, gushes to his fiancé, Violet (Emily Blunt), in “The Five-Year Engagement,” which Segel co-wrote with director Nicholas Stoller, his writing partner for “The Muppets.” The latest in the Judd Apatow-produced comedy oeuvre, “Engagement” follows the couple’s bumpy road to nuptials, and feels like…
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Lyrical Voices of Zion
Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry By Alan Mintz Stanford University Press, 544 pages, $65 The 19th-century German writer Heinrich Heine foresaw what would happen to his fellow Jews: “If Europe were to become a prison,” he mused, “America would still present a loophole of escape… Then may the Jews…
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Books Author Blog: Montefiore’s Ramsgate
Earlier this week, Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award Winner Dr. Abigail Green wrote about the making of a good biography and traveling in the footsteps of Montefiore. 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,…
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Remembering Mother in Graphic Form
Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me By Sarah Leavitt Skyhorse Publishing, 128 pages, $14.95 Early on in Sarah Leavitt’s heartbreaking account of her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease comes what I think of as The Conversation. It’s the moment a family needs but at the same time dreads, when the reality everyone…
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How Yossi Lost Jagger
It’s been almost 10 years since “Yossi and Jagger” came out (no pun intended) to rave reviews. The movie, of course, is Israeli director Eytan Fox’s romantic drama about two male soldiers who fall into a doomed love at the front in Lebanon. The subject matter, a gay relationship within the context of the Israeli…
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Where’s ‘Wally’?
Sometime in the mid-1990s I was asked by a Jewish arts organization to arrange an art trip to Europe — preferably to look at modern and contemporary art. I immediately suggested that we visit German art museums, since there are so many of them and they have been so active in those fields of collecting…
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Coming to Africa
When I heard that a West African-Israeli collaborative venture called the Touré-Raichel Collective was going to be performing this month at City Winery, an upscale venue in lower Manhattan, I had serious misgivings. Was I curious? You bet. Was I optimistic? Not in the least. My wariness had nothing to do with the band’s hyphenated…
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