This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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October 15, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Four Jewish families — 12 people in all — were asleep in their Harlem tenement on 120th Street and Madison Avenue, when a thief snuck in through a window and chloroformed them all. The thief then proceeded to steal all the cash from the apartments. The Levinskys’ apartment was…
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Marrying I.B. Singer and Grandma Moses
Originally published in the Forward April 22, 1994. It is early evening in Crown Heights, and children fresh from yeshiva trickle into a narrow storefront. They dump their books, fling off their coats and sprawl on the gray industrial carpeting. There they spend the next hour raptly contemplating a kitchen kettle. This is not some…
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A Twilight Unto the Nations
In the world of comics, Israel has a long and lively culture of illustrated political commentary. There’s even an Israeli Museum of Caricature and Comics in Holon to honor that tradition. Contemporary work from graphic novelists such as Rutu Modan, Yirmi Pinkus and Asaf Hanuka is attracting international raves, and the scene is filled with…
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Eban Gets Plastered — With George Segal
Originally published in the Forward June 16, 1995. Abba Eban has endured countless situations fraught with danger, discomfort and uncertainty, but none quite like the one he faced when George Segal wrapped his body in plaster-impregnated bandages. This was the first step in the making of the cast that was to become “Portrait of Abba…
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Drama and Global Politics, From Irish and Jews
You probably know that there are Jews in Ireland — Leopold Bloom, in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” is Jewish, after all. But that’s Dublin. There isn’t a lot written about Northern Irish Jews, apart from a fairly well-known story about Jews ending up there, thinking they were already in America and staying on to work. Belfast’s…
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Books Of a Jewish Banking Dynasty, Only the Sculptures Survived
Edmund de Waal, a British artist and the son of a clergyman of the Church of England, knew he was missing a vital part of himself, but he wasn’t sure what it was. A middle-aged married father of three, he had spent his adult life ensconced in his London studio, where he made thousands of…
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Helen’s Head
In Eli Valley’s latest satirical comic, the Jewish community finds salvation in an unlikely source. Click on the thumbnail to the right for a larger version: Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His column, “Comics Rescued From a Burning Synagogue in Bialystok and Hidden in a Salt Mine Until After the War,” appears monthly…
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Batsheva Dances, Challenging Gender — and Demonstrators
Men and women appear on different nights in the four dances of “Project 5” by the Israeli modern dance company Batsheva. Once again using Ohad Naharin’s distinctive choreography, Batsheva presents a series of powerful but mixed performances at New York’s Joyce Theater. But on a recent evening, audience members had to make it past a…
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The Most Important Nazi Film They Didn’t Let You See
More than six decades after its intended release, the documentary “Nuremberg” should have secured its own small but notable place in American film history. Funded, but later suppressed, by America’s government, the documentary records the first major trial involving crimes against humanity, and features then unseen footage taken by the Germans themselves. But despite its…
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Blessing a Building — Building a Blessing
The construction of a new synagogue is always an occasion for celebration, so it was with particular pomp that the Rhineland city of Mainz recently dedicated its new synagogue and Jewish community center. The dedication ceremonies, held September 3, featured an array of German politicians, including German President Christian Wulff. Many of them blessed the…
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One Image To Make Man and Woman?
Probably no section of the Bible has more exercised the interpretative powers of its readers than the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, with which we again begin the annual cycle of Torah readings on Simchat Torah — and, arguably, no two verses in these chapters have aroused more discussion over the ages than…
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