Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Books Terrorist Noire
It is often forgotten that before the existence of film noir, there was literary noir. The genre came to prominence in novels by James Cain, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who wrote “The Maltese Falcon” in 1930. Its origins can be found even further back, in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” from 1907. It is…
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Books Q&A: Meg Wolitzer on Sex, Suburbs — and the Workmen’s Circle
Meg Wolitzer writes in spaces where women’s emotions run high: She has tackled wives overshadowed by their husbands, as well as career woman who became stay-at-home moms. In her new novel, “The Uncoupling” (Riverhead), she investigates sex by creating characters who stop having it altogether when a spell enchants their suburb. The magic begins —…
The Latest
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The Clock Strikes Now for the New Klezmer Wave
There’s a new sound in Jewish music. It’s coming from young musicians with one foot in Brooklyn and the other on klezmer’s silk road through Europe: Paris, Berlin, Krakow, Budapest and points east. These musicians have bands with cheeky names, like Yiddish Princess and Electric Simcha, and they’ve come of age in a cultural landscape…
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The Thinking Person’s Guide to the Holocaust
A Way To Begin With the help of your suggestions, Lawrence L. Langer, Michael Berenbaum, Joanne Weiner Rudof and Paula Hyman have compiled this all too brief list of writers, scholars and works. The list includes paintings, novels, memoirs, films, poems and graphic works, as well as historical studies. It provides a possible first step…
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King Solomon, The Unknown Story
Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom: By Steven Weitzman Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25 Many Christians and Jews believe that the wisdom of King Solomon extended well beyond ordinary human perception. A gift from God, it allowed him to understand the hidden forces of nature, the inner workings of human motivation and the mysteries of…
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Israel and the ‘M’ Word
On the face of it, there was no need for anyone to be embarrassed by the much publicized WikiLeaks disclosure that Israel’s former minister of housing, Labor Party member Yitzhak Herzog, told an American diplomat in 2006 that ex-defense minister and then Labor Party head Amir Peretz was perceived by the Israeli public as being…
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Encounter With Alekhine
My father, Otto Feuer, had been a chess champion (he won the Belgian title in 1936), and his hero had always been the Russian chess champion Alexander Alekhine. One day, in the Buchenwald latrine, Otto came upon what he thought was a miracle of sorts: There on the ground was a page from a recent…
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May 6, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Reports have surfaced about a group of English archaeologists who have found the ark, the tablets and the menorah from the Second Temple buried in a secret underground location in the Old City of Jerusalem. A Swedish researcher who found a coded message in an ancient manuscript in Constantinople…
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Books April 11: An Eerie Confluence of Dates
Deborah Lipstadt’s most recent book, “The Eichmann Trial,” is now available. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: It was the 50th anniversary of the start of the Eichmann…
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Dissecting a Trial of Love, Hate and Human Despair
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial By Janet Malcolm Yale University Press, 155 pages, $25 In October 2007, a crime rocked the clannish, insular community of Bukharan Jews settled in the Forest Hills section of Queens. Bukharan Jews, descended from a mysterious Asian pottage of influences, are thought by some to be…
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With Too Much Information, the Truth Is Sometimes Hard To Watch
If you’re looking for a balanced review of The New Group’s remounting of Wallace Shawn’s 1979 play “Marie and Bruce,” you might as well stop reading now. I’m just going to fail you. When it comes to the plays of Shawn, I’m not capable of even feigning objectivity. Everything I admire in the theater, everything…
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