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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In a Jewish Nobel laureate’s new collection, recipes for surviving a cold, hard winter
Winter Recipes from the Collective By Louise Glück Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 64pp, $25 The new book of poetry from Louise Glück — her first since she won the Nobel in 2020 — provides a steady unfolding of meaning, quite out of proportion to its brevity. Comprising 15 poems spread out over 40 pages, the…
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Surviving the Holocaust was a miracle, but the nightmares persist
The memories of Holocaust survivors never cease to horrify. Whenever you think you’re shock-proof, you have to think again. In John Rokosny’s PBS documentary, “They Survived Together,” one survivor recounts how the Nazis, having invaded Poland, forced Jews to carve out their own graves and lie down in them. Often, the self-created graves contained families,…
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What Yiddish (and the Forward) are doing in the new ‘Spider-Man’
Everytime Spider-Man flirts with the fickle multiverse he encounters a couple of constants. The first is that a version of Spider-Man exists in every reality. The second is that Jews do too. Even, it would seem, the Jews who write for this very Jewish paper. In “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Jews are everywhere. As David…
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Wait, Robinson Crusoe wasn’t Jewish — was he?
This month marks the 300th anniversary of the death of Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor who served as inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” a novel cherished by generations of readers. The tale of the shipwrecked mariner, first published in 1719, pleased a wide readership avid for adventure stories, like the Jews who relished travel…
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A mensch of an architect, full of whimsy, genius and morality
Richard Rogers, the English architect who died on Dec. 18 at age 88, proved that it can take a Jewish village to achieve architectural greatness. Cocreator of such popular buildings as the Pompidou Center in Paris, Rogers was born in prewar Florence. He was influenced by his father’s Italian Jewish family, especially a cousin, the…
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Undeniably, a great film — but is it Israeli? Or Palestinian? Or both?
“Is the film Israeli? Or is it Palestinian?” This is the question I’ve been asked more than any other as I’ve shared my excitement about Eran Kolirin’s film “Let It Be Morning,” based on the novel by Sayed Kashua. It tells the story of a fictional Arab village in Israel that goes under lockdown at…
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That time ‘I Love Lucy’ confronted antisemitism in front of millions of Americans
A nice thing about being alive in this current moment in history is that one can say things like, “television is the great American art form” and people will actually take you seriously. And if television is the great American art form, Lucille Ball is one of its most important founders. If you haven’t seen…
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In a notorious French internment camp, harrowing reminders of the consequences of extremism
“When the artist finds himself,” Max Ernst famously remarked, “he is lost.” That he had never found himself, Ernst added, was “his only lasting achievement.” And yet, Ernst had indeed once found himself in, well, surreal circumstances. In 1939, the 50-year old German painter who had lived in Paris since the early 1920s was caught…
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Aaron Sorkin has done his homework on ‘I Love Lucy’ — does that mean we have to do ours?
The films Aaron Sorkin writes and directs — so far those would be “Molly’s Game” (2017), about the real-life poker organizer Molly Bloom; “The Trial of the Chicago 7” (2020), about the real-life trial following the 1968 DNC riots; and now “Being the Ricardos,” about the real-life marriage of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the…
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‘Holocoste’ sweatshirt taken down by Ukrainian Jewish group
Thousands of stores sell knockoff brand merchandise. But one decided to take it a step further by bringing antisemitism into it with a “Holocoste” sweatshirt, featuring a crocodile like the Lacoste brand’s logo. Elina Katz, a program coordinator for Project Kesher in Ukraine, noticed the sweatshirt for sale on a major e-commerce site called Prom,…
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The most powerful Jewish artist you’ve never heard of
A massive exhibit at one of Miami’s leading art museums is reclaiming a place in art history for an iconoclastic but little-known Jewish artist and Holocaust survivor. . The show, “My Name Is Maryan”, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami, explores the legacy of the Polish-born artist Maryan, who survived an…
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