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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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Fast Forward As rivals talk antisemitism, this NYC mayoral candidate pitches a bread and butter appeal to Orthodox voters
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Opinion The staggering hypocrisy behind Trump’s deal to free the last living American hostage
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Fast Forward Russell Brand defends Ye’s ‘Heil Hitler’ music video
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Opinion Though sworn enemies, Hamas and Donald Trump seem to share a common language
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