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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A 94-year-old Holocaust survivor makes her feature film debut – and a new star is born
It is rare, I think, to leap from making matzoh balls to making movies. But it is even rarer, I imagine, to land the leap with élan. Yet this is the accomplishment of “Trop d’amour,” a film by a young French actress and filmmaker, Frankie Wallach, starring her grandmother Julia Wallach, the maker of kneidlach…
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Why reading Elie Wiesel — and his posthumous new book — can offer us new hope
During Elie Wiesel’s lifetime, he wrote over 40 books, including seven collections of profiles of Jewish sages. “Filled With Fire and Light,” a posthumous eighth volume, was released this month. It is a treasury of previously unpublished lectures about the lives of biblical prophets, talmudists and leaders of the Hasidic world. Though it may sound…
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How a Jewish woman from Baltimore found a new religion in Henri Matisse
Growing up in the tightly-knit Jewish community of Baltimore in the 1960s, I took special pride knowing that the dazzling paintings — by such modern masters as Picasso, Cezanne, Monet and especially Matisse — that lined the gallery walls of a special wing in the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) were all there thanks to…
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From Brighton to Anatevka: 50 years later, a cast of ‘Fiddler’ remembers the show that changed their lives
Editor’s Note: Fifty years ago, on Nov. 3, 1971, the movie adaptation of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ premiered. In honor of that anniversary, we are publishing a series of article about the impact of ‘Fiddler’ and its legacy. You can read more of the stories here. A full spotlight comes up on Keith Parsky, center…
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Fried chicken & waffles, a South L.A. tradition, goes kosher
Update, 3/18/22: Melrose Bite announced today it was no longer kosher in an Instagram post. It’s the dawn of Kosher Food 3.0, at least in Los Angeles. Out with pastrami on rye and matzo ball soup. In with chicken-and-waffles. Yes — kosher chicken-and-waffles. The arrival of Melrose Bite, a kosher fried chicken joint in the…
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A Jewish prisoner. An SS officer. A forbidden relationship. An absolutely stunning documentary.
There seems to be little doubt that SS officer Franz Wunsch was intensely in love with Helena Citron, a pretty and talented Jewish inmate in Auschwitz. Her feelings for him, however, remain ambiguous. It is indeed the unanswered core question of the stunning documentary, “Love, It Was Not,” that is at once rooted in the…
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How a real FBI interrogation became the most surreal show on Broadway
Most of Tina Satter’s plays dance around plot, focusing less on events than small, weird, moving micro-moments. This isn’t true of her most recent work, “Is This A Room,” currently on Broadway. In 2017, Satter read the transcript of the FBI interrogation of a young intelligence specialist named Reality Winner, who leaked an intelligence report…
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‘Blewish’ celebrates Black and Jewish intersectionality through children’s animation
What happens when you mix Black and Jewish identity with animation artistry and the drive to take intersectional representation up a few notches? You get Ezra Edmond’s debut children’s short film, “Blewish,” which is having its world premiere at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival. Edmond, who is in his early thirties, is a Los…
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Retire? Pack the court? A Jewish Supreme Court justice’s answers are unconvincing
The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics By Stephen Breyer Harvard University Press, 128 pages, $19.95 Fair or not, the most frequent question U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer gets asked these days is when he plans to retire. “There are many considerations” was his Sphinx-like response in an August interview with…
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Books Israel’s largest booksellers pull Sally Rooney’s novels
Soon it will be even harder to find Sally Rooney’s books in Hebrew. Two major bookstore chains in Israel, Steimatzky and Tzomet Sefarim, announced they will no longer sell Rooney’s work The Times of Israel reported Thursday. The move comes after the writer caused an uproar by announcing she would not have her latest novel,…
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How a unique Torah scroll scribed by a woman led to a historic bar mitzvah
When Gavriel Kedem became a bar mitzvah, he was focused on the usual things: chanting the parsha, giving his dvar, the people watching. He wasn’t thinking about it as a historic moment. But it was — Gavriel was chanting from a scroll written by his mother, Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem, the first woman ever to be…
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