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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Why there were more Jews than Christians in Dante’s ‘Paradise’ (and no Jews of his time in Dante’s ‘Hell’)
This year, commemorations of the 700th anniversary of the death of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of “The Divine Comedy,” have scarcely addressed the subject of how Dante wrote about Jews. Dante places a number of Old Testament Jews, including Abraham, Sarah, Rachel and Joshua in Paradise. Because some of the limited space is…
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Adolf Eichmann is alive and well and living in America
In a recent column in the Washington Post, the conservative commentator Michael Gerson reflected on Republican opposition to the government’s efforts to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19. Perplexed by the lies parroted by GOP politicians and pundits, he observed that neither opportunism nor fanaticism fully explained their behavior. “This is hard,” Gerson confessed, “to get my…
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The dangerous disrespect of making Anthony Bourdain speak from the dead
I should have trusted my bullshit detector; Anthony Bourdain would be ashamed of me. (At least I think he would.) There were moments in Morgan Neville’s “Roadrunner” that seemed a bit too perfect. The perfection didn’t stem from cinematography or editing or the arbitrary intercuts of Kurosawa films. It didn’t come from the insights of…
The Latest
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To show how men gaslight women, Ilana Glazer’s pregnancy horror movie gaslights the audience
Spoiler alert for the movie “False Positive.” Pregnancy doesn’t need much embellishment to be fodder for a horror movie, what with morning sickness and ricocheting hormones, not to mention a parasitic life form feeding from you. And that’s all before you give birth. This is probably why pregnancy has inspired several horror flicks — most…
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WATCH NOW: November 16: Fighting Antisemitism and Hate in Los Angeles
Watch now. L.A. Controller Ron Galperin will host a virtual event in collaboration with the Forward to discuss the increase of antisemitism and hate crimes in Los Angeles and how government officials and residents can come together and stop them. Featured speakers will include Rob Eshman, National Editor, the Forward; Ron Galperin, Los Angeles City…
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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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