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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Jew vs. Jew in Levittown
Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb By David Kushner Walker & Company, 256 pages, $25. Virtually since its founding on New York’s Long Island in 1948, “Levittown” has been a byword for conformity: houses, people, aspirations; a kind of origin narrative of suburban homogeneity. But David…
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Former Mayor Ed Koch on His Bout With Depression
In the Forward’s Bintel Brief advice column this week, Ed Koch — New York City’s 105th mayor — speaks candidly about his bout with depression. Responding to a question from an ailing elderly woman who feels her life is no longer worth living, Koch shares how, in 1989, when he was the mayor of New…
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What’s ‘Good For the Jews’
What’s good for the Jews? Well if you ask three Jews you’re likely to get five answers. Luckily the some of them are more entertaining to listen to than that of your grandma, rabbi or Seder companion. Rob Tannenbaum, a member of the musical comedy duo Good for the Jews — David Fagin is the…
The Latest
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Nuptial Disagreements
Getting hitched in Israel is hardly a simple proposition, as a new documentary on the subject shows. In the Jewish state, marriage is only possible through Israel’s chief rabbinate — the pre-eminent religious governing body, which predates the founding of the state itself; non-Jewish Israelis must be married by their own religious authorities. In addition,…
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My Father’s House; My Mother Tongue
On April 7, the eve of Passover, Israeli television did something unprecedented: It aired a film in which the entire dialogue was in Yiddish. Director Dani Rosenberg’s movie, “Beit Avi” — literally, “My Father’s House”; known in English as “Homeland” — is a 40-minute drama about a young Holocaust refugee who comes to Israel in…
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Cosmetic Differences
When cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein first opened her New York beauty salon on East 49th Street, her chief competitor, Elizabeth Arden, promptly moved her salon just four blocks away, to East 53rd Street. Years later, when the flamboyant Rubinstein, known as “Madame Rubinstein,” married a Georgian prince, Arden followed suit and tied the knot with…
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Folding, Twisting or Burning Bridges
Levi Riven doesn’t look like a compelling subject for a documentary film. But the amiable, slightly graying psychology student is at the center of Montreal filmmaker Eric Scott’s recent movie, “Leaving the Fold,” a revealing look at Hasidic Jews who have abandoned their religious upbringing for a secular lifestyle. After receiving plaudits at the Montreal…
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The Case For Cuckolds
THE ACT OF LOVE By Howard Jacobson Simon & Schuster, 333 pages, $25 ‘Coming From Behind” (1983), Howard Jacobson’s first novel, begins with a campus mailman opening the door to a professor’s study and leaving a letter between the professor’s buttocks as he is performing the title act on a female student. His second novel…
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Between Wordsworth and ‘Shoah’
Claude Lanzmann, born 83 years ago in a northern Paris suburb, to parents of Ukrainian-Belarusian Jewish origin, is internationally famed as the director of the 1985 film “Shoah.” This epic film’s running time, depending on its country of release, is anywhere from 503 minutes in the United States to a whopping 613 minutes (with all…
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Not Written in Stone
The Ten Commandments have served as a guide for human behavior and outlook for thousands of years, yet rarely, says artist Rudi Wolff, have they inspired visual artists. In the exhibit Ten Commandments/Ten Images: A Visual Journey, presented in New York City through April 29 at Saint Peter’s Church’s Narthex Gallery, at 54th Street and…
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Forget Harvey. Got Milk?
Got milk? For most of us, it’s a simple enough business to pick up a carton of 1%, 2%, fat-free, pasteurized, organic or free-range milk from the grocer’s shelves. The kind we choose to drink is largely a matter of taste, a function of our cholesterol or an expression of support for local dairy farmers….
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