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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On the northwest side of Chicago, my old Jewish neighborhood may soon live on in infamy
Albany Park was home to Rosenblum's Bookstore, Weinberg's Clothing — and also alleged DC shooter Elias Rodriguez
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A Light Onto a Long, Dark Night
A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad By Robert Wistrich Random House, 1,184 pages, $40 In 1974, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League authored “The New Anti-Semitism,” one of their series of rather lurid books that were basically collections of ADL memoranda on right-wing antisemitic thugs and acts. The…
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A Moment Fell Like a Star
Can a literature die with a man? When White Russian-born Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever died in Tel Aviv on January 20 at the age of 96, this may be what happened. Sutzkever was the last great living Yiddish writer, and though it is not inconceivable that he may have successors, this does not seem very…
The Latest
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‘A Tango Between God and Satan’
The odd Eurovision Song Contest win aside, the post-1948 Israeli popular music scene was an insular one for decades, appealing little to Diaspora Jews, let alone the wider world. Yet once the irresistible tide of globalized mass media struck Israel in the 1980s and ’90s, Israeli music became enriched by a host of local subcultures…
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A Brutal Narcissist: The Life of Feminist Icon Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles By Panthea Reid Rutgers University Press, 464 pages, $34.95. Tillie Olsen’s raw and emotionally charged story “I Stand Here Ironing” was a public revelation of the private and isolating pain of the modern mother. Her exposure of the overwhelming love and frustration, the hope and desire, the anger and…
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The Bottom Line
“So how do you get on with other cartoonists? I mean, isn’t it rare for an Israeli cartoonist to be a right-wing religious settler?” It was a fair question. More than 80 educators from San Francisco had been listening to and looking at the work of Shay Charka and were both impressed and disturbed. Charka’s…
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The Greening of Art
Global warming, energy shortages, the fragility of the natural world — these issues are no longer relegated to the fringes of culture. Jewish “eco-artists,” as they are called, have increasingly stepped into activist roles to provoke people’s thinking about the environment. “I’m very conscious of living during an age of excess,” says New York eco-artist…
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The Environment in Spiritual Crisis?
Climate activists are banding together, claiming that December’s United Nations Summit on Climate Change was a turning point in the movement for climate action, which has taken a small group of insiders and is turning it into a grass-roots global juggernaut. More than 20,000 NGO representatives registered for the Copenhagen summit, and many stood outside…
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Fruits of the Desert On a Table Near You
Even the most devoted locavores have their limits. While eating seasonal, locally grown food can be rewarding, both ecologically and culinarily, there are certain dietary staples that one just cannot find at North American farmers’ markets or through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Like coffee. Or chocolate. Or that all-important ingredient of healthy cooking:…
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Why Kings and Animals Lost Their New Years While Trees Keep Celebrating
Growing up on the snow-swept banks of Lake Ontario, I experienced the celebration of Tu B’Shvat as the triumph of hope over reality. The rebirth of vegetation was banished to the dark recesses of a damp bathroom closet, where we would try to get lima beans to sprout. If, by some miracle, the mold did…
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February 5, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward In Krakow, a young father took his own life just as the Sabbath was coming to a close. The man, 30-year-old Nossen Ehrlich, was the son of a well-known and successful local businessman. The younger Ehrlich, however, had been stricken by a string of bad luck and never achieved…
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Heads of Clay
The February 2 announcement of the Academy Award nominations will include five nominees for Best Animated Film, instead of the usual three, a testament to the large number of worthy contenders this year (or maybe just the pressure applied by major studios to push their most lucrative product). It means there may be room for…
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Opinion Israel is becoming a pariah state. Here’s what American Jews must do.
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Culture On the northwest side of Chicago, my old Jewish neighborhood may soon live on in infamy
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