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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Bridge isn’t just for your grandparents anymore
When I think of bridge, I think of my grandmother, who played regularly with her bridge club until she died. I associate the game with a sort of 1950s housewife aesthetic, and the elderly. The whole thing feels quaint. But according to “Dirty Tricks,” a documentary that premiered Thursday at the Hot Docs festival, bridge…
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Why Jeff Goldblum, living meme and baboon whisperer, still matters
They, uh, broke the mold when they made Jeff Goldblum. A delightful eccentric, whose charms lean into singularity, is a kind of cultural anomaly when it comes to lasting power. His iconography — from his “Creation of Adam”-recline in “Jurassic Park,” to a straight-ahead shot of his face from “The Fly” that adorned bathroom stalls…
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Inside the Hidden History of Rosenwald Schools
Julius Rosenwald, the son of Jewish immigrants who fled religious persecution in Germany, turned Sears, Roebuck & Co. into America’s largest retailer. Booker T. Washington, who was born into slavery, created the Tuskegee Institute and led the college for more than 30 years. Their groundbreaking partnership in the early decades of the 20th century led…
The Latest
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My mother, my dream and Mama Rose
My mother, Lily, was born in 1911 on a dining room table in the Bronx. She would live through World War I, the Spanish Flu, Women’s Suffrage, the Roaring Twenties, the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, and World War II before she was 30. She took her final bow on June 23, 2014 at…
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So many years after the Holocaust, still an unbearable silence
She died too young, too, too young. So, memories are few. It’s the boiled tongue I remember, the very large cow’s tongue – like yours and mine. Don’t recall the cooking. Did water get changed in the very large pot, before it was done? The pink meat was speckled with white. What did it taste…
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Remembering Anne Douglas, a woman of charity and a late convert to Judaism
Anne Buydens Douglas, who died April 29 at age 102, collaborated with her husband Kirk Douglas in extraordinarily generous philanthropic ventures. The couple, both of whom reached their centenary, showed that advanced age can be accompanied by heightened humanistic values. Born Hannelore Marx in Hanover, Germany, to a family of wealthy industrialists, she acquired business…
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Why Jews are still crazy about mahjong
From the 1920s until today, mahjong has captured the imagination of American Jewish players like few other games. Annelise Heinz, who teaches at the University of Oregon, is the author of “Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture.” Recently, I spoke with Heinz about what mahjong has meant to Jewish communities….
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How Jewish TikTokers are trying to reclaim an antisemitic trend
“If I Were a Rich Man” is one of the most iconic songs from “Fiddler on the Roof.” In it, Tevye, borrowing from niggunim, a wordless Jewish meditative tune, dreams of a better life outside the shtetl. Unfortunately, the beloved song has been turned into a flourishing antisemitic trend on TikTok, spawning more than 25,000…
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What almost saved — but ultimately doomed — peace in the Middle East
Yasser Arafat once insisted on cutting up Dennis Ross’s chicken during a dinner; Ross was then head of the American effort to arbitrate peace between Israel and Palestine. At the time, it seemed like a sign of hospitality and hope — Ross joked that Arafat had “a Jewish mother syndrome.” These days, after the Human…
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How Blake Bailey embodied Philip Roth’s spirit — and betrayed his legacy
When I spoke last month with Blake Bailey, the disgraced author of Philip Roth’s biography, I asked one question that seemed to shock him. It wasn’t the one about what he had to say to critics who suggested his biography of Roth was marred by deep misogyny. Bailey — whose book has been permanently pulled…
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After Kristallnacht, a hunger artist confronts a splintering world
The Passenger By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz; translated by Philip Boehm; preface by André Aciman Henry Holt and Company/Metropolitan Books, 266 pages, $24.99 A feverish urgency infuses Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s rediscovered novel about a frantic German Jewish businessman after Kristallnacht, an internal refugee whose doomed travels both echoed and prefigured the author’s own. Boschwitz’s Jewish father…
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