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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Bob Dylan’s overblown new music video offers only a ‘Shadow’ of transcendence
I confess that I was in a pretty bad mood yesterday when it was time to log in to view “Shadow Kingdom,” a global, online pay-per-view event starring Bob Dylan. I had spent a large part of the day reading deeply into the news — about the upswing in COVID, catastrophic and deadly natural events…
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Jews have survived a lot — and this artist is preparing us for the apocalypse
The last 16 months have felt like an apocalypse movie at many points — a global pandemic, the attack on the Capitol, a massive drought and widespread forest fires in the Western U.S., even those murder hornets that briefly made headlines. Yet to artist and architect Daniel Toretsky, the catastrophes felt familiar; Jews have faced…
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How a Jewish spy infiltrated the U.S. atomic program — and helped the Soviet Union build the bomb
Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away By Ann Hagedorn Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $28 Was the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s nothing but political hysteria? For all its deleterious effects on free speech rights, reputations, and careers, it seems not. Cold War fears of the domestic threat…
The Latest
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WATCH NOW: December 8: The Chosen at 40: A conversation with the writer-director of the classic Jewish film
Watch the conversation here. In 1981, Jeremy Kagan wrote and directed the classic film “The Chosen,” based on Chaim Potok’s novel about two boys from very different Jewish families in 1940’s Brooklyn. To celebrate the movie’s 40th anniversary, Kagan will join the Forward’s executive editor Adam Langer for a discussion of the movie and its…
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July 26-30: A Yiddish Renaissance: A Virtual Concert Celebration
This virtual concert celebration will start streaming on Monday, July 26 at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT and will be available for viewing through Friday, July 30th at 2 PM ET / 11 a.m. PT. Register here. The Forward is proud to sponsor this Virtual Concert Celebrating the Revival of Yiddish in Culture,…
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Why there were more Jews than Christians in Dante’s ‘Paradise’ (and no Jews of his time in Dante’s ‘Hell’)
This year, commemorations of the 700th anniversary of the death of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of “The Divine Comedy,” have scarcely addressed the subject of how Dante wrote about Jews. Dante places a number of Old Testament Jews, including Abraham, Sarah, Rachel and Joshua in Paradise. Because some of the limited space is…
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Adolf Eichmann is alive and well and living in America
In a recent column in the Washington Post, the conservative commentator Michael Gerson reflected on Republican opposition to the government’s efforts to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19. Perplexed by the lies parroted by GOP politicians and pundits, he observed that neither opportunism nor fanaticism fully explained their behavior. “This is hard,” Gerson confessed, “to get my…
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The dangerous disrespect of making Anthony Bourdain speak from the dead
I should have trusted my bullshit detector; Anthony Bourdain would be ashamed of me. (At least I think he would.) There were moments in Morgan Neville’s “Roadrunner” that seemed a bit too perfect. The perfection didn’t stem from cinematography or editing or the arbitrary intercuts of Kurosawa films. It didn’t come from the insights of…
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To show how men gaslight women, Ilana Glazer’s pregnancy horror movie gaslights the audience
Spoiler alert for the movie “False Positive.” Pregnancy doesn’t need much embellishment to be fodder for a horror movie, what with morning sickness and ricocheting hormones, not to mention a parasitic life form feeding from you. And that’s all before you give birth. This is probably why pregnancy has inspired several horror flicks — most…
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WATCH NOW: November 16: Fighting Antisemitism and Hate in Los Angeles
Watch now. L.A. Controller Ron Galperin will host a virtual event in collaboration with the Forward to discuss the increase of antisemitism and hate crimes in Los Angeles and how government officials and residents can come together and stop them. Featured speakers will include Rob Eshman, National Editor, the Forward; Ron Galperin, Los Angeles City…
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A contrarian artist who took inspiration from a Hasidic rabbi and a Vietnamese general
The French artist Christian Boltanski, who died on Bastille Day at age 76, expressed emotions through conceptual art associated with Judaism as well as universal experience. His Ukrainian Jewish father escaped deportation during the Nazi Occupation of Paris by hiding in a space under the floorboards of the family apartment for 18 months. Boltanski’s mother,…
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