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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The Gate and The Gatekeepers: Kamenetz, Kafka and Reb Nachman
Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka By Rodger Kamenetz Schocken/Nextbook, 384 pages, $25. In “Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka,” Rodger Kamenetz has set for himself the ambitious task of bringing about a meeting of sorts between two great men who lived 100 years and hundreds of miles apart….
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Marching Toward Obscenity
Some years ago, on an overcast spring morning, I visited Majdanek, the Nazi concentration camp near Lublin, Poland. I recall many disturbing sights from that day — the gas chamber, the barracks, the monumental concrete bowl containing tons of human ash. But one unnerving sight was more about the living: the teenagers who had wrapped…
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Mexican Jews in the Land of Death
One might think, since two of the more or less half dozen Jewish-themed Mexican films are about a wake, that the Mexican-Jewish community of about 35,000 is obsessed with death. And indeed, it might well be. After all, Mexico’s fascination with death is ubiquitous, from the Aztec ritual of sacrificing virgins to the gods at…
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Who’s That Guy in the Black Hat Next to Cuomo?
Only one ultra-Orthodox fixer appears to have accompanied New York gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Cuomo on all four of his early October visits to Brooklyn’s Hasidic rebbes. A YouTube video (see below) shows the man, wearing the fedora typical of the non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox, sitting diagonal to Cuomo in a meeting with Rabbi Zalman Leib Teitelbaum, one…
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October 22, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward It is not known why Henry Greenwald wanted to kill Adolph “Pickles” Berg, but as the former chased the latter down a street in New York City’s Harlem area, pointing a revolver at him, “Pickles” grabbed a 12-year-old schoolboy by the name of Charlie Fisher and used him as…
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Howard Jacobson Wins Literary Prize
Howard Jacobson’s “The Finkler Question” has won this year’s Man Booker Prize. In Britain, where they still read lots of books, they take their literary prizes seriously, and the Booker is the Oscar of prizes. It means more than the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award rolled into one. The prize money…
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The Nigun Project: Silent Song
I have known Basya Schechter since I was a teenager — longer than I have known any of my other Nigun Project collaborators, thus far. And “Pharaoh’s Daughter,” Basya’s remarkable world fusion singing-songwriting project, has become a phenomenon in the Jewish music world. Somehow over the years of frequently crossing paths and sharing a band…
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Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, Hello Grandkids of My Original Fans
From this you make a living? No undertaking deserved that Jewish punch line more than turning the French folksong “Frère Jacques” into a parody called “Sarah Jackman.” But Allan Sherman showed how that could be done. Sarah Jackman, Sarah Jackman How’s by you, how’s by you? How’s by you the family? How’s your sister Emily?…
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Are They Giving an Oscar to an Anti-Semite?
Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences intends to award an honorary Oscar to iconic French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard on November 13. But will the academy be honoring a notoriously vocal, albeit French-speaking, anti-Semite? Admired for avant-garde films like “Breathless” (1960); “My Life to Live” (1962) and “Contempt” (1963), Godard is one of the…
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Books Soviet Literature in Dark Times
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Translated by Ezra Glinter. When I bought Natalia Gromova’s book, “The Downfall: The Fate of a Soviet Critic in the 1940 and ‘50s,” it didn’t occur to me that it would have a Jewish dimension. I’m generally interested in this period and in this subject, and…
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Books ‘I Remember Papa,’ Fottorino Says of his Moroccan Jewish Father
At the tender age of 50 Éric Fottorino is not just CEO of the company which owns the French daily “Le Monde,” but also a prize-winning novelist. And now Nice-born Fottorino has just produced an intensely personal memoir addressing his Jewish ancestry, “Questions for my Father,” recently published by Les éditions Gallimard. Fottorino belatedly reconnected…
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News Exclusive: ADL chief compares student protesters to ISIS and al-Qaeda in address to Republican officials
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Opinion Pete Hegseth is targeting a Jewish American hero — who’s next?
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Opinion The two things I fear most after the horrifying attack on Jews in Boulder
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Opinion If Trump is being compared to Hitler, who was Hitler before he was Hitler?
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Culture Aaron Lansky built a home for 1.5 million Yiddish books. Now he’s handing over the keys.
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Fast Forward Greta Thunberg’s Gaza flotilla could reach Israeli waters over the weekend: What you need to know
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Fast Forward French police detain Palestinian man who allegedly struck rabbi with a chair
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