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 requiem for the backyard minyan
On the other side of the old wood fence in the rear of my parents’ Los Angeles backyard I could hear a young man reading from the Torah, and people reciting kaddish, and everything else that distinguished an authentic prayer service from the solitary ritual I’d grown accustomed to since the stores ran out of…
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‘We Cannot Be Silent’ — Jewish workers in devastated countries face unusual dangers and difficult choices
In October 2018, Joel R. Charny was in northeast Syria. As president of the Norwegian Refugee Council USA, Charny was evaluating water, shelter and education programs for Syrians forced from their homes. In its seventh year of civil war, Syria was considered the most dangerous country on earth by the Institute of Economics and Peace….
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A very normal, totally logical, sort-of-Jewish Father’s Day gift guide
Gift guides for men are perplexing documents. In their haste to assure our dads and ourselves that men don’t like clothes, cosmetics, or anything that can’t be classified as a “gadget,” publications have urged the purchase of some truly deranged items. Doorbells that connect to his iPad. Camping knives with functions that almost no dad…
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Noticing how one of the world’s great noticers notices
Depending on how you look at it, Geoff Dyer is either the prototypical contemporary English-language writer or the outlier. Awards committees love him, and publishers do, too: his pace (nine books in the last 10 years!) is as relentless as Twitter’s. His range is as vast as Wikipedia’s. His style is briskly lucid; while most…
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Ravaged by Alzheimer’s, a star professor tries to remember how to love
Morningside Heights By Joshua Henkin Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $26.95 One of the terrors of aging is the prospect of Alzheimer’s disease. An even worse scourge, though, is the variant of the disease that afflicts the merely middle-aged – the brutal early-onset Alzheimer’s so memorably embodied by Oscar winner Julianne Moore in the 2014 film…
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Palestinian advocacy groups drew tens of thousands of new followers on social media. But can they move that support offline?
While Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip traded missiles in May, a parallel war exploded on social media. And though analysts disagree about the relative gains of Israel and Hamas on the battlefield, in the field of social-media, the pro-Palestinian cause seems to have increased its share of hearts and minds — or…
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What if ‘Call Me By Your Name’ was French? (And less Jewish)
François Ozon’s “Summer of 85,” which hit the Jewish film festival circuit earlier this year, seems like a coup for any lineup: a sumptuous period piece that competed at Cannes and isn’t about the Holocaust should be opening night material. But what makes it Jewish? The film, which comes to cinemas in New York and…
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Photo collection captures Hasidic life round the world
Read this article in Yiddish The Polish photographer Agnieszka Traczewska has just published a second collection of photographs of Hasidic Jewish life, entitled “A Rekindled World.” In this new album she presents scenes of daily life among ultra-Orthodox Jews in America, Israel, Canada, England, Belgium and Brazil. Her previous collection, “The Returns,” centered on images…
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One lesbian romcom delivered with a side of Holocaust memories
Warning beeps greet the audience at the very start of “Kiss Me Kosher.” They come from the burglar alarm for Shira’s bar, “The Real Jewish Princess,” though there doesn’t seem to be anyone there. Shira (Moran Rosenblatt), named the bar for her beloved but cantankerous grandmother Berta (Rivka Michaeli), a Holocaust survivor whose painting hangs…
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How one dance lover is preserving the Jewish history of ballet — one blog entry at a time
Beatrice Waterhouse happened to go to a college that had a notable dance program. She hadn’t taken a ballet class since her early teens, but she figured she’d take a course on the history of dance. It sounded cool — plus, she needed the elective. “It turned out to be a history of basically ethnic…
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Ferris Bueller turns 35 — and I still hate him
I had a friend from camp who loved Ferris Bueller and lived by the Tao of his maxim: “Life moves pretty fast if you don’t stop to look around once in a while.” The friend’s name was, funnily enough, Cameron. Cameron (the person, not the character in the film) made friends easily, had a Hebrew…
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