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Culture Bob Dylan’s 10 Most Jewish Songs
While Bob Dylan has, throughout his life and career, engaged in all sorts of mythologizing and playful biographical falsification, it has never been in the service of denying his heritage. This son of a middle-class appliance salesman from the Upper Midwest, who grew up with a Yiddish-speaking grandmother down the hallway in an extended Jewish…
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Opinion Nevada Jews Swing Like the State
A Southern California rabbi, on learning that I was researching a book on Jews in Nevada, said: “Don’t waste your time. There were no Jews in Nevada until there was a Las Vegas.” It is true that the greater Las Vegas area is currently home to about 100,000 Jews, compared with 13,000 in the rest…
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Opinion Sizing Up State of Jewish People
There are titanic, 21st century global forces confronting the entire world, but which will have unique impacts on the Jewish people, both in Israel and the Diaspora. Jews, as they have for millennia, will find a way to adapt to them. But the Jewish people face an even greater challenge, one with a less certain…
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News Jewish Life Slowly Dying in Abkhazia
“Yosef Ashkenazi,” a smile creeps across my new acquaintance’s wizened face as he introduces himself and adds “but not Ashkenadze!” That pronunciation would leave Yosef with a typically Georgian surname. But the –adzes and the –shvilis — another telltale Georgian name ending — have all but left Abkhazia. Seventy-year-old Yosef Ashkenazi is, of course, an…
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News Jewish Numbers in Congress Set To Plunge
The U.S. Congress will see a steep drop in Jewish members after the November election, a Forward analysis suggests. The Forward is projecting that 31 Jews will serve in the next Congress — eight fewer than the number that served at the start of the last Congress. Interactive map of 2012 Congressional elections involving Jews…
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News Keeping the Conversation Going
When my mother started to lose memories in her 90s, she moved into a residential community near me, in Cambridge, Mass. I had been a cultural critic of age in America, an “age critic,” for decades. But the focus in my books — beginning with “Safe at Last in the Middle Years” — had been…
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News Painting as Prayer in Poland
This summer I traveled for the first time to Poland, where my grandparents were born, to help recreate an 18th-century wooden synagogue from the town of Gwoździec. This trip was an expression of a deep desire to connect with my own “Polishness.” I wanted to engage in a creative activity in a place often associated…
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Fast Forward German Gov’t Drafts Bill Allowing Circumcision
BERLIN—Germany’s Ministry of Justice has presented a draft law to permit circumcisions by doctors and mohels in response to uncertainty about the procedure fueled by a Cologne court’s ban on the procedure. The Cologne court’s June ruling, which angered many among the country’s 4 million Muslims and 100,000 Jews, held that circumcision deprives a child…
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Opinion Zohran Mamdani’s victory proves it: The ‘gotcha’ mode of fighting antisemitism has to go
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News What a Mayor Mamdani would mean for New York Jews
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Fast Forward Mamdani tells Colbert — and a national audience — why NYC Jews shouldn’t fear him as mayor
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Opinion Mamdani’s victory is an opportunity for Jews to relearn the art of disagreement
In Case You Missed It
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Music Anyone who tells you that you shouldn’t meet your heroes never met Jill Sobule
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Opinion Can we say Donald Trump’s Middle East nuclear strategy is dangerous — if it isn’t even a strategy?
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Opinion ‘Israel is seen as violent’ — and Israeli chefs, once global culinary icons, are feeling the heat
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Culture As Mel Brooks turns 99, his wisdom matters more than ever
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