Nathan Abrams
By Nathan Abrams
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Culture The super-nerdy reason ‘Wonder Woman’ is set in 1984
Why was the latest “Wonder Woman” movie set in 1984? The obvious reasons are that it gave the moviemakers a chance to indulge in the same sort of 1980’s nostalgia seen in the television series, “Stranger Things.” It also allows its creators to revisit the Cold War and the end of Ronald Reagan’s first term…
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Culture The secret Jewish history of the condom
If you have bought or used a condom in the United States or Britain, you most likely have a Jewish person to thank. While Jews didn’t invent them – penis sheaths have a long history stretching back to ancient times – Jews certainly played a huge role in the development of the modern rubber prophylactic….
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Film & TV The secret Jewish history of ‘Dune’
Aside from its British pronunciation (“Jew-une”), the epic science fiction novel “Dune,” which is again being remade this year has a lot more Jewish resonances than one might expect. . Frank Herbert’s novel was originally published in 1965. It has been adapted for the screen several times, including a 1984 film by David Lynch and…
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Culture In a Polish Netflix thriller, undercurrents of The Holocaust
In the proliferation of Jewish-themed shows on streaming services, one in particular has not gotten the attention it deserves. The omission is surprising given that it is an excellent six-part thriller in which Jewish themes run deep. “The Woods,” currently on Netflix, is an adaptation of a 2007 novel of the same name by the…
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Culture Why Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001’ is the ultimate golem story
News that one of the iconic spacesuits from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” is going up for auction, gives us occasion to explore the link between the myth of the golem and Kubrick’s legendary science fiction film. The suit was made by the company P. Frankenstein & Sons Ltd. in Manchester, England, and the…
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Culture How Kraftwerk helped reimagine a post-Holocaust Germany
The founder of pioneering German electronic group, Kraftwerk, Florian Schneider has died at 73. While there is nothing explicitly Jewish about the legendary band, or its founder, Kraftwerk was open in its attempt to create a new German identity in the wake of, and as a reaction to, Nazism and the Holocaust. Take, for example,…
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Culture What’s up with the anti-Semitic imagery in British cartoons this week?
Two political cartoons published this week in the UK have shown that anti-Semitic imagery is alive and well in the British imagination. Christian Adams’s drawing for the Evening Standard (the newspaper edited by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osbourne) depicts the new Labour Party Leader, Sir Keir Starmer, welcoming back former Labour leader,…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History Of ‘Death Wish’
It has been forty-five years since the first “Death Wish” movie was released. It has a surprisingly rich yet hidden Jewish history. Before becoming as a movie franchise that has lasted for six films between 1974 and 2018, “Death Wish” started life as a 1972 novel with a Jewish protagonist. Brian Garfield’s book of the…
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Opinion Right-wing insurrectionists tried to topple the German government in 1920 — it’s happening again in Trump’s America
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Theater Can a kinky new Yiddish musical resurrect a lost art — and one man who got spanked to death?
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Fast Forward Josh Shapiro’s Judaism was not why Kamala Harris snubbed him, new book claims
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Yiddish דאָקטוירים פֿון אַן אַנדער שניטDoctors of a different sort
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
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