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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Disturbingly bigoted and irredeemably misogynistic? How will future readers view Philip Roth?
The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography By Jacques Berlinerblau University of Virginia Press, 208 pp, $29.95 According to an old joke, the Lone Ranger and his trusty sidekick Tonto find themselves surrounded. “We are going to die,” the Lone Ranger says, to which Tonto replies: “What do you mean ‘we?’” Though…
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Netflix’s Holocaust revenge drama changes the facts – is nationalism to blame, or just an actor’s mistake?
As villains go, you can’t do much better than the one at the center of Netflix’s latest, a man called “Doctor Death.” In “Jaguar,” a crew of Spanish Holocaust survivors in 1960s Madrid hunt down Aribert Heim, a real-life Nazi physician who escaped justice for nearly half a century. “He was a doctor at Mauthausen,”…
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How two visionary Jewish nightclub owners changed the face of entertainment
From the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, Mr. Kelly’s — a nightclub on Rush Street in Chicago — was a new kind of entertainment venue. Intimate (just 200 seats) and relatively inexpensive, it merged a range of programs, including jazz and stand-up comedy, on the same program. Mr. Kelly’s helped to launch the careers of…
The Latest
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At a Jewish chicken farm, Sukkot is a time for homemade pesto, random dancing, and making friends with strangers
If you arrived at Linke Fligl around 3 p.m. last Sunday and ambled into the tall grassy meadow at the heart of the farm, you would have seen something curious: A bunch of Jews squatting in patches of goldenrod, counting their blessings. They — or rather we, since I was among them — were saying…
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Art Now in English, an almost-forgotten story by Sholem Aleichem
We know the usual occupations in Sholom Aleichem’s fiction: dairyman, butcher, tailor. But did you hear the one about pickpockets (or “nimble fingers”), robbers (“snatchers”) and horse thieves? If not, don’t worry — most haven’t. As far as we know, Sholom Aleichem, the beloved Yiddish author best-remembered for his Tevye stories, only wrote about such…
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Is Facebook biased against Palestinians?
During the most recent Gaza conflagration, both Israelis and Palestinians hurled accusations of censorship at social media giants, including Facebook and Instagram. Palestinians said that their posts about Israeli soldiers entering the al-Aqsa mosque complex in Jerusalem were disappearing without even a warning, and so were other posts accusing Israel of violence. Meanwhile, Israeli influencers…
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Why Jewish compassion shouldn’t just apply to human animals
Marc Bekoff, an American Jewish biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has studied coyotes, dogs, penguins, fish, grosbeaks, and jays to understand their thoughts and emotions from a perspective of interdependence akin to the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s “I and Thou.” Benjamin Ivry spoke to Bekoff from his home in…
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On an artist’s journey of discovery, embracing mythology while rejecting the bible
At an exhibit titled “Personal Mythology” by an Israeli artist, you’d expect to see some biblical references — perhaps an apple tree, or King David with his harp. But there aren’t any; Tarot cards, witches and alchemical creatures populate Ranei Mazor’s sculptures and dioramas. “I have a very good history and record with the stories…
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The secret Jewish history of Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest songs of all time
This past week Rolling Stone magazine published an updated list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” It was the first time the list has been updated since 2004, and out of curiosity, we combed the list for Jewish performers and songwriters. Depending on one’s criteria — e.g., if a band has a Jewish…
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September 30: Film screening & discussion of “The Forward: From Immigrants to Americans”
This event is in partnership with the Museum at Eldridge Street. It will take place on Thursday, September 30 at 6 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. PT. Register here. Join the filmmakers and Editor-in-Chief of the Forward in a conversation about this historic documentary. From its founding in New York in 1897, the Forward served…
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From Drake to Javanka, 12 celebs who need to atone this Yom Kippur
Everyday Jews have the benefit of not having our sins amplified by TMZ or splashed onto tabloid covers. We can hide in our anonymity and use Yom Kippur to engage personally with our creator, taking stock of our sins while God, like Anna Wintour plotting the Met Gala invitations, decides who will be inscribed in…
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