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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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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An Israeli Indiana Jones searches for her Lost Ark — and finds a political fault line
What would happen if Indiana Jones was an Israeli woman? And what if her hunt for the Ark of the Covenant could embolden Israeli settlers and upend the lives of Palestinians? Eisner Award winner Rutu Modan’s new graphic novel, “Tunnels,” a madcap dive into the charged world of Israeli antiquities, gives us the answer. Modan…
The Latest
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Art In Frank Lloyd Wright’s only synagogue, a masterful blending of color and light
Driving south along Old York Road in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, a giant milky-glass tetrahedral dome, cross-hatched with cast-aluminum, seems to rise from the surrounding woods. A bold pastiche of prehistoric, modern and biblical, it simultaneously evokes Mayan ruins, a Japanese pagoda and Mount Sinai, while creating a wholly new form. Beth Sholom, dedicated on Sept….
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Retrying the Dreyfus case, France flirts with a Jewish candidate’s antisemitism
On Oct. 26, French President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated the Dreyfus Museum in Médan near Paris, the first such historical collection dedicated to the unjustly accused Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus. Macron’s visit underlined that you don’t have to be Jewish to be shocked by the French army’s perfidy in covering up its persecution of Dreyfus. Back…
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In ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ Chava is a hero. But she wasn’t always.
Editor’s Note: Fifty years ago, on Nov. 3, 1971, the movie adaptation of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ premiered. In honor of that anniversary, this week we are publishing a series of article about the impact of ‘Fiddler’ and its legacy. You can read more of the stories here Given the vaunted position of “Fiddler on…
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How Neil Diamond wrote his best song and worst album — and why it’s all Lenny Bruce’s fault
“Stones,” Neil Diamond’s seventh studio album, celebrates its 50th anniversary on Nov. 5. It was a pretty big success in its day, reaching #11 on the Billboard 200, selling over 500,000 copies, and containing two Top 20 hits — one of which, “I Am… I Said,” may be the greatest song Diamond ever wrote. And…
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Will this woman be the next Jewish winner of the Nobel Prize for literature?
After the deaths of Philip Roth and Amos Oz, two perennial runners-up for the Nobel Prize in Literature, this past year’s short lists for the award included only one Jewish representative, the French author Hélène Cixous. Born in Oran, Algeria in 1937, Cixous has written repeatedly about her upbringing in a German Jewish household, which…
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Marriage and exile at 15: Coming of age in a central Ohio JCC production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
Editor’s Note: Fifty years ago, on Nov. 3, 1971, the movie adaptation of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ premiered. In honor of that anniversary, this week we are publishing a series of article about the impact of ‘Fiddler’ and its legacy. You can read more of the stories here That I ended up cast in the…
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In a small Arab village, a marriage isn’t consummated. Neither is anything else.
Eran Kolirin’s new film, “Let It Be Morning” (“Vayehi Boker”) begins with a wedding in a small Arab village. We know little about the couple — and they seem to know little about each other — but their marriage seems doomed. First, because the celebratory doves, released at the ceremony as a symbol of love…
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Planter of forests, uprooter of a population — the tangled legacy of Israel’s Yosef Weitz
“Blue Box” is a documentary about an Israeli hero who planted the country’s trees but who is also, perhaps, a villain for uprooting three quarters of a million Arabs from their villages. Because Yosef Weitz — known both as “Father of the Forests” and “Architect of Transfer” — was in charge of the Jewish National…
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