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 contrarian artist who took inspiration from a Hasidic rabbi and a Vietnamese general
The French artist Christian Boltanski, who died on Bastille Day at age 76, expressed emotions through conceptual art associated with Judaism as well as universal experience. His Ukrainian Jewish father escaped deportation during the Nazi Occupation of Paris by hiding in a space under the floorboards of the family apartment for 18 months. Boltanski’s mother,…
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A “Black x Jewish” way to confront racism and antisemitism
A BET special, “Content for Change: Black x Jewish,” explores the histories of oppression experienced by Black Americans and non-Black Jewish Americans, as well as the need to build solidarity between the groups. Its producer is Lacey Schwartz Delgado, a Black Jewish woman whose internationally acclaimed film “Little White Lie” revealed her own complex identity…
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Why Anthony Bourdain was his own best storyteller
The best episode of Anthony Bourdain’s food and travel show “No Reservations” is probably “Beirut.” Bourdain and his crew were in Lebanon in 2006. They filmed two scenes and then the second Israel-Lebanon war started. Bourdain’s local fixers knew what was coming and the host had to reckon with what he was doing — the…
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How Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg created history’s most dangerous golem
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination By Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang Harper, $29.99, 352 pages It should be a great Jewish American success story. Perhaps the greatest. Mark, Jewish son of a psychiatrist and a dentist, has a vision of how to harness technology to connect people. Sheryl, daughter of a college…
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How Judy Chicago became part of art history
Judy Chicago, whose immense body of work draws on overlooked women’s history, the tragedy of the recent Jewish past and features no small amount of literal fireworks, is having yet another moment. Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in (naturally) Chicago, the artist, whose name is regularly appended with words like “controversial,” will receive her first-ever retrospective…
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Why does everyone want Jerusalem? CNN investigates in a new docuseries
Sunday night, after Jews around the world mourn the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem on Tisha B’av, CNN will premiere a series that — in so many words — traces 3,000 years’ worth of conflict to the laying of those structures’ cornerstones. Solomon’s Temple, author Susan Wise Bauer argues in “Jerusalem: City of Faith…
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2021 Emmys: All the Jewish nominees, from Jurnee Smollett to Michael Douglas
(JTA) — At the last Emmy Awards, “Schitt’s Creek,” the comedy from Jewish father-son duo Eugene and Dan Levy, swept the night, winning every comedy category for its sixth and final season. While there’s no big Jewish show to cheer on for another powerhouse performance this year, there’s still a bevy of Jewish nominees, which…
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Canceled fashion blogger is easy to hate — but it’s no excuse for antisemitism
Leandra Medine Cohen, founder of quirky fashion site Man Repeller, said she always assumed she’d be canceled — she just thought it would be because she was a terrible leader, not because of racism or privilege. She didn’t even realize she was privileged, she said in a recent podcast interview, until last summer’s racial justice…
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A newly-animated Anne Frank for today’s Europe
“She’s the greatest spiritual treasure this country has produced since Rembrandt,” a modern-day Dutch policeman explains in Ari Folman’s “Where is Anne Frank,” which recently premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. He’s speaking to a little girl in 1940s clothing who is skating down a frozen canal in Amsterdam and who introduces herself as…
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Ari Folman wants his ‘Anne Frank’ to inspire and motivate young audiences
Though Ari Folman’s “Where Is Anne Frank” received a 15-minute standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, the animated movie wasn’t aimed at the film industry types whose eyes welled with tears in the Palais Des Festivals. Folman made the story for children. The animated story gives a voice and a face to Kitty,…
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Is the organ donation system run by a ‘God Committee’? This writer-director wants us to ask.
When writer-director Austin Stark, 42, heard about a wealthy man in desperate need of a liver transplant bribing a hospital for an organ, he was shocked and appalled — and couldn’t stop thinking about it. “And then I read a powerful play by Mark St. Germain, which explores a very similar situation, and in doing…
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