Four Jewish facts for the 4th of July
What you need to know about Independence Day's Jewish connotations.
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Culture Can Jewish schools meet the challenge of Black Lives Matter?
Editor’s note: In observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Forward is resurfacing some of our recent coverage related to the Black-Jewish experience and racial justice. Barthelemy Atsin had his first encounter with the police when he was 13 years old: They pulled over as he walked down a street with friends, and subjected…
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Life Round Challah For The High Holidays? Try These Other Traditional Shapes!
In my decades as a congregational rabbi, I always knew it was time to order our challot for the season the moment I started drafting my five High Holiday sermons. I knew that there would be no time to bake one, much less several, though I did manage to prepare our family version of seasonal…
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Fast Forward Lithuania Defends Nazi Collaborator Accused Of Killing Jews
(JTA) — Lithuania’s state historical institute on the Soviet domination of the country defended in court a deceased collaborator with Nazi Germany who is accused of murdering Jews. The Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania defended Jonas Noreika against the allegations by numerous historians last month in…
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Opinion No, Yiddish Is Not A Corruption Of German
To most people, Yiddish and German are closely related. The languages share many root words and grammatical structures, and most speakers of one language can at least understand an individual speaking the other. To early German Christian scholars, like to many laypersons today, Yiddish was seen as a corrupted and lesser form of German. But…
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Opinion Who Are The Jews Of France? Their Last Names Give A Clue
In my previous article, I wrote about the mysterious Jews of Italy, who seem to be neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi. So it was natural to turn to a neighboring West European country, France, where the history of the Jewish communities is also quite non-linear. These communities pose a similar difficulty to the simplistic and popular…
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Opinion Neither Ashkenazi Nor Sephardi, Italian Jews Are A Mystery
One often hears about two main cultural groups of Jews: Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Some also speak of a third group, Mizrahim, for the Jews who lived in modern Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Georgia and Uzbekistan. But these groupings can be more complicated than they at first seem. There are three main ways of approaching the…
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Community In Cologne, Archaeologists Unearth The History Of Germany’s Oldest Jewish Community
After attending the New Waves Day 2018 concert in Dusseldorf, Germany last month, I took a train to Köln, or what we know as Cologne. It was the nearest big city, and I wanted to see if the waterfront along the Rhine was as spectacular as Dusseldorf’s. But what I saw there was even grander….
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Music In 1964, when he was just 23, Bob Dylan wrote the prophetic anthem that encapsulates Trump’s America
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Fast Forward It was a historic Jewish night at the Oscars. Why are so many Jews outraged?
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Film & TV Mikey Madison is Jewish — is ‘Anora’?
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Opinion Trump’s treasury secretary is about to make a catastrophically bad move on Israel
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Fast Forward ICE arrests Palestinian protest leader at Columbia, in sharp escalation of campus actions
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Books Two middle-aged women defied the Nazis. One ‘wrote’ a book that betrayed the other.
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Fast Forward What does the election of Mark Carney mean for Canadian Jews and Israel?
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Culture Why are Jews buried in a plain pine coffin?
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