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JTA
EST 1917

How do you rebel against a culture while still participating in it? The Orthodox Jewish punk band The Groggers might be the perfect answer. Their just-released album There’s No ‘I’ in Cherem is a mix of reverent songs and supremely irreverent ones. (“Cherem,” by the way, is the Hebrew word for “excommunication.”) The song “Friday Night Lights” is a surprisingly tender tribute to the “Shabbat mitzvah”–that’d be, uh, sex–and […]

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Shaking a lulav might get a lot harder this year. During the holiday of Sukkot, Jews all over the world shake the lulav (date palm) and etrog, together with branches from myrtle and willow trees. In these days of globalization, each of these Four Species is harvested from a different place. Most date palms, for instance, come from Egypt. In the aftermath […]

At first thought, Jews don’t seem to have much in common with dwarves, those fictitious creatures from medieval tales. But J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), a philo-Semite and author of Lord of the Rings, based his depiction of dwarves on his knowledge of the Jewish people. Tolkien historian John Rateliff, in his book The History of the Hobbit, claims that Tolkien’s fascination […]

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