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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Theater Group Makes Torah Learning Fun
Wearing a funny hat and spewing bad biblical puns, Aaron Friedman didn’t look or sound like your typical Moses as he took to the stage during a recent performance by the Bible Players theater group. “What’s the difference between an Israeli and an Israelite?” he asked fellow actor Andrew Davies, who played the part of…
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Philadelphia’s Day School Dilemma
When Len Lipkin and his wife, Jill Maderer, a Reform rabbi in Philadelphia, started thinking about kindergarten for their son last year, they chose a Quaker school. “It’s tough,” sighed Lipkin, explaining why they didn’t go the Jewish day school route. “The question really became, do you need to have [Judaism] in every piece of…
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Yiddish a Mixed Bag at Jewish Schools Worldwide
For some Jewish day schools, there is no teaching Yiddishkeit without Yiddish. Buoyed by the Yiddish renaissance of the past two decades, which has produced an increased interest in university Yiddish programs, a renewed interest in Yiddish theater and even the advent of Yiddish heavy metal bands, these schools have held steadfast to their Yiddishist…
The Latest
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Reinventing Hebrew School
There’s one thing you can say about Jewish parents: They know what they want for their children. They want excellence, they want attention, they want warmth and they want preparation for what comes next. They demand it — and they usually get it, whether it’s for a baby yoga class or for an elementary school….
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Books Yiddish Icons, Portrayed in Cartoons
Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land Edited by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle Abrams ComicArts, 240 pages, $29.95 People don’t admire paintings they haven’t seen, or dance to music they haven’t heard, but they do all sorts of crazy things with languages they don’t speak. This is what Rutgers University scholar Jeffrey Shandler described…
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Books Lee Siegel Fails To Get Serious Enough About Seriousness
Are You Serious?: How To Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly By Lee Siegel HarperCollins, 212 pages, $24.99 The first I ever heard of Lee Siegel was in 1999, I believe, when he was hosting a panel in New York City, at The Cooper Union. The friend who had invited me…
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Novelist Patrick Modiano Peers Into Moral Ambiguity
Few European writers today have been more consistently haunted by modern Jewish history than French novelist Patrick Modiano. The selection of works by Modiano available in English represent only a small fraction of his prolific fictional output. All his books, including “Dora Bruder,” (University of California Press, 1999), the brooding account of his search for…
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Books Researching Jewish Sports
On Monday, Doug Stark wrote about the best Jewish basketball team ever. His new book, The SPHAS: The Life and Times of Basketball’s Greatest Jewish Team, is now available. His 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…
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Chilik Frank Brings Soul of Hasidism to Klezmer
For my bar mitzvah, my great-uncle gave me a cheap GPX stereo system. Despite the fact that it was a piece of junk from the bargain retailer Jamesway (remember Jamesway?), given by a self-proclaimed audiophile who had promised to get me something good, that stereo had a huge impact on my musical life. That year,…
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Homeschooled Jews Are Minority Within a Minority
‘I’m sorry,” the blond girl with the wide blue eyes said, “you’re going to go to hell.” She looked like she really was sorry. “I don’t believe in hell,” I said. “You don’t have to stay Jewish,” she said, “just because you are now.” It was 1997. I was 10 years old, and, like the…
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Jewish Genetic Diseases? There’s An App for That
Move aside Angry Birds. There’s a new “killer app” in the iTunes store. Released in July, the free app, called Gene Screen, offers insight into 28 recessive genetic diseases, 19 of which occur at higher frequencies among Ashkenazi Jews. The new program for iPhones and iPads comes complete with an interactive world map of disease…
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Yiddish אַ פֿײַערונג לכּבֿוד ייִדיש־ליגעס „ווערטער פֿון דער וואָך“ A celebration of the League for Yiddish series ‘Words of the Week’
גיטל שעכטער־ווישוואַנאַט, וואָס פֿירט אָן מיט דער סעריע, וועט רעדן וועגן דעם אָפּרוף פֿון אָן אַ שיעור לייענער.
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