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 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…
The Latest
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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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2021 Emmys: All the Jewish nominees, from Jurnee Smollett to Michael Douglas
(JTA) — At the last Emmy Awards, “Schitt’s Creek,” the comedy from Jewish father-son duo Eugene and Dan Levy, swept the night, winning every comedy category for its sixth and final season. While there’s no big Jewish show to cheer on for another powerhouse performance this year, there’s still a bevy of Jewish nominees, which…
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Canceled fashion blogger is easy to hate — but it’s no excuse for antisemitism
Leandra Medine Cohen, founder of quirky fashion site Man Repeller, said she always assumed she’d be canceled — she just thought it would be because she was a terrible leader, not because of racism or privilege. She didn’t even realize she was privileged, she said in a recent podcast interview, until last summer’s racial justice…
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A newly-animated Anne Frank for today’s Europe
“She’s the greatest spiritual treasure this country has produced since Rembrandt,” a modern-day Dutch policeman explains in Ari Folman’s “Where is Anne Frank,” which recently premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. He’s speaking to a little girl in 1940s clothing who is skating down a frozen canal in Amsterdam and who introduces herself as…
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Ari Folman wants his ‘Anne Frank’ to inspire and motivate young audiences
Though Ari Folman’s “Where Is Anne Frank” received a 15-minute standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, the animated movie wasn’t aimed at the film industry types whose eyes welled with tears in the Palais Des Festivals. Folman made the story for children. The animated story gives a voice and a face to Kitty,…
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Is the organ donation system run by a ‘God Committee’? This writer-director wants us to ask.
When writer-director Austin Stark, 42, heard about a wealthy man in desperate need of a liver transplant bribing a hospital for an organ, he was shocked and appalled — and couldn’t stop thinking about it. “And then I read a powerful play by Mark St. Germain, which explores a very similar situation, and in doing…
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For Laurel and Hardy, a surprisingly deep Jewish history
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first appearance in the same film, “The Lucky Dog” (1921) by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the comedy duo whose work featured a surprising amount of Yiddishkeit. At the start of the 1930 film “Blotto,” during a moment of domestic discord, Laurel puzzles over a Yiddish newspaper,…
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Meet the husband and wife behind Williamsburg’s first Hasidic art gallery
Just off Flushing Avenue, a bustling thoroughfare in Hasidic Williamsburg, there’s a basement full of art. Chiaroscuro portraits of eminent rabbis. Scenes of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. Modernist sculptures of men kissing their tefillin, tender floral still lifes, a collection of old violins splatter-painted in exuberant colors. Housed in a lower-level ballroom in the Condor Hotel,…
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