Free Republic

Whose Culture Is It? by Tom Teicholz Does it bother you when a white man sings the blues? Is jazz exclusively an African American art form? When Eminem (who is white) is the most popular rapper, Tiger Woods (who is part African American and part Asian) is the greatest golfer and Serena and Venus Williams (African Americans) dominate women’s tennis, should it upset us that Jewish Culture Festivals are run by non-Jews for audiences of primarily non-Jews, and that klezmer music is performed by non-Jewish performers for non-Jewish audiences? These thoughts came to mind reading Ruth Ellen Gruber’s “Virtually Jewish”...

Dec. 13, 2004 1:21 | Updated Dec. 13, 2004 13:20 Bye-bye, religious parties By ELLIOT JAGER Michael Melchior and Moshe Feiglin make strange bedfellows. Yet in talking to both men last week, I was struck by how much they had in common. They agreed that the era of religious political parties in Israel was coming to a close, that mixing politics and Judaism had been detrimental to civil society, and that an alternative way had to be found to instill Jewish cultural values into the body politic. The Danish-born Melchior is a velvet-yarmulke-wearing Orthodox rabbi and Labor-Meimad Knesset member. But...

Christian Meyer A klezmer jam session at the restaurant Shakespeare's in Weimar last month: a renaissance of Jewish music without Jews. WEIMAR, Germany ON a hill a few miles outside this historic city, the Ettersburg Palace sits in ramshackle splendor, thickly enshrouded by the German past. Illustrious figures like Bach, Goethe and Schiller came through here, but just beyond a ridge lies the other side of German history: the concentration camp of Buchenwald, among the darkest sites of the 20th century. Both histories loomed in the background recently, as warm strains of Jewish music filled the castle. A talented...

KRAKOW, July 22 (JTA) — During a visit to Poland this summer, Tad Taube recalled the moment when his mother learned that her father had been killed at Auschwitz. “It was in 1942 or 1943,” said Taube, a California-based philanthropist. “She had adored her father; he was the central figure in her life. When she got the news, I distinctly remember that she spent the next six months crying. And that was followed by other communiques about family members who were killed.” Born in Krakow in 1931, Taube and his parents escaped Poland on the eve of World War II....