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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As Empathy Fades
Let us now think of the tsunami. Few do anymore. It’s been months since those waves washed across Asia and across our television screens; our sympathies, once so stirred, have receded with the calming of the waters. This is only natural, of course. Empathy is bound to ebb with passing time as surely as the…
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The Journalist as Memoirist: A Modern Tale
For journalists trained to bear dispassionate witness to history as other people make it, the terrain of memoir is a treacherous one: Memory, they fear, can be a quicksand of hazy reminiscence and wishful thinking into which objective facts disappear, never to be recovered. Reporters traffic in verifiable truth, and instinctively recoil from the subjective…
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The Memorial de la Shoah
PARIS The recently unveiled Memorial de la Shoah in Le Marais, the fashionable Paris neighborhood that witnessed massive deportations of Jews during World War II, is — as its patrons and advocates like to point out — Europe’s oldest Holocaust memorial. In a sense, it was inaugurated in 1943, when a Russian Jewish emigre named…
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NAZARETH
“The first Arab museum of the Holocaust,” as it is touted, somewhat tentatively in the Israeli press, is in fact a hopeful shot in the dark fired off by a single man: the Israeli-Arab attorney Khaled Mahmid, 43, whose education at Hebrew University opened his eyes to the horrors of the Holocaust in a way…
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LOS ANGELES
Apparently, a museum dedicated to tragedy does not have to leave out friendliness and fun. A guide gives each visitor to the Museum of Tolerance a personal introduction, with a second welcome provided by an electronic host composed of television screens, all explaining that, deep down, everyone is prejudiced. The first few rooms of the…
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LONDON
London’s main Holocaust exhibit is neither Britain’s largest nor even a free-standing structure. (Both those distinctions go to the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire.) The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, on London’s South Bank, spans two floors within a broader exhibit on Britain’s military prowess, its soberly arresting displays a marked contrast…
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BERLIN
In the city where Nazis plotted the extermination of the Jews, the recently built Jewish Museum runs like a jagged scar across the still-recovering metropolis. The museum is ostensibly dedicated to the entire history of Jews in Germany, but the architecture leaves little question that in Berlin, the policies of the Nazi government invariably overwhelm…
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Auschwitz
Walking under the metal gate that reads “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Brings Freedom”) is a seminal moment for visitors to Auschwitz — a chill-inducing passage into a place of death. It comes as some surprise, then, to learn that it was actually upon passing the ticket-takers’ booth in the parking lot that visitors entered what…
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WASHINGTON
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been widely hailed as a critical and popular success, drawing rave reviews and attracting 21.6 million visitors since its opening in 1993. More important than any of the first-rate exhibitions, however, was the decision to make the museum a federal institution and build it on the National Mall…
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In Memoriam
Last month, Yad Vashem, widely viewed as the first and most recognizable Holocaust museum in the world, inaugurated a completely redesigned new building. The project seems to have been propelled, at least in part, by the proliferation of regional museums and curated spaces devoted to memorializing the Holocaust. In honor of Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust…
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April 29, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Because of the current state of unrest throughout Russia, Jews fear that signs are ripening for a wave of pogroms to take place, coinciding with the celebration of Orthodox Easter. Making matters worse, a Christian cleric in Zhitomir has been openly agitating among his Orthodox congregants for an attack on the…
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