Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the robust lives of American Jews. Here there’s a little of everything about the multifaceted world of Jewish life. There are light-hearted Jewish celebrity stories and shocking Jewish celebrity news. Food is also plentiful,…
Life
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Why Newsweek’s ‘Most Influential Rabbis’ List Is So Short on Women
Newsweek magazine is out with its annual list of what it deems the 50 most influential rabbis in the country. As usual, women are a tiny number of those selected by the three entertainment-industry figures: the heads of Sony Pictures, News Corp. and Jewish Television Network Productions — all men, and all based in Los…
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A Public School Lesson in Bat Mitzvah Etiquette
The faculty at Scarsdale Middle School launched a $10,000 “empathy program,” to teach students how to be nicer to one another, after witnessing a rise in several alienating acts: name-calling, gossip, cafeteria cliques and the wearing of personalized bar-mitzvah gear, according to an article in Sunday’s New York Times. As part of the program, students…
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Eliot Spitzer and Victoria Floethe Celebrate the ‘Good Book’
Slate recently hosted a party to celebrate the transformation of one of its editorial projects, a blog about reading every page of the Bible, by the Web magazine’s editor, David Plotz, into “Good Book,” published last month by Harper. Since Plotz more or less summarizes the Bible in a 21st century vernacular, we thought it’d…
The Latest
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Balkan Beat Box Out With Its ‘Nu’ Album on Tuesday
If Arab club music, Israeli hip-hop and klezmer had a ménage à trios, its love child might sound something like Balkan Beat Box. Joining musical genres and artists across political spectrums the group aims to erase political borders through music saying, “our ears don’t have them, why should we?” The group blends musical influences from…
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Newspapers Doctor Photos of Israel’s Female Politicians
Two Orthodox newspapers ran doctored photos of Israel’s new cabinet. Missing in the altered photos are the cabinet’s female members. Ministers Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver posed for the official cabinet photo, but the BBC reports that Yated Neeman newspaper added two men to the photo in place of the women, while Shaa Tova simply…
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‘Seven Jewish Children’ — Provocative Playlet or Agitprop?
Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza” is inciting more controversy stateside since it jumped the pond. Last week, Washington’s Theater J, staged two free readings of the 10-minute playlet that the The Washington Post called “a beautifully crafted cheap shot” and “an effort to compress to black-and-white a question of conscience of…
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Michael J. Fox Cuts In on the Circumcision Debate
“Whose penis? Whose body? Whose rights?” read one sign. “You Want to Cut Off WHAT?” read another. These were a couple of the slogans of the approximately 50 demonstrators at 16th annual rally in favor of making male circumcision illegal. Held to commemorate Genital Integrity Awareness Week and the 12th anniversary of Congress’s ban of…
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Crumbs of Creation
The Guardian reports that Robert Crumb has completed his interpretation of The Book of Genesis, which is scheduled for publication on October 19. For those seeking a sneak peak, Crumb shared sketchbook pages and descriptions of his artistic process with Todd Hignite for Hignite’s 2006 book “In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists.” From Crumb’s…
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Sound Bite Comes Back To Haunt Israel’s New Gov’t
Three questions created by the installation of the new government: 1). Just how hawkish will it be? Everyone has had their crack at answering this question, but the most notable attempt must be that of the London-based Guardian. It got so carried away that it ended up printing this correction in today’s paper: “In an…
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New York’s ‘Heymishe’ King of Swing
Ever since the Loehmann’s opened its doors there in 2007, the basement of the Ansonia apartment tower on Manhattan’s Upper West Side has become a destination for bargain hunters. A generation ago, the building’s basement was destination of another sort: It housed the wildly popular heterosexual sex club Plato’s Retreat, over which New York’s “King…
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Exiled Ayatollah: Iranian Regime on Verge of Collapse
As the country is busy speculating whether the brand new Benjamin Netanyahu-led government will end up going to war with Iran, a former member of Iran’s Khomeini government has said that Israelis are over-estimating the life expectancy of the Iranian regime. “I guarantee that within two years Iran’s regime will collapse,” Ayatollah Dr Mehdi Haeri…
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