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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The secret Jewish history of Rita Moreno (who just might be a descendant of very secret Jews)
At age 89, Rita Moreno is still going strong, with a role in the upcoming remake of “West Side Story” by Steven Spielberg (she starred as Anita in the original film) and a leading role in the rebooted TV sitcom “One Day at a Time,” which was an ongoing venture until filming was shut down…
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What does the Museum of Modern Art have to do with Palestinian oppression?
Of all the museums to criticize for its ties to imperialism, the Museum of Modern Art seems like a strange one. Why not the Metropolitan Museum, or the British Museum, institutions that exhibit older art, often pilfered by conquering Europeans? But the Strike MoMA movement is about a lot more than, well, striking MoMA. The…
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How a former Anglican monk’s story inspired a gay French-Jewish romance
British writer Aiden Chambers, whose 1982 young adult novel, “Dance on my Grave,” inspired the movie “Summer of ’85,” says he couldn’t be more delighted with the results. Specifically, that Francois Ozon, a French filmmaker, adapted and directed the gay love story. Hollywood would have sentimentalize it while a British director might have turned it…
The Latest
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Liberated at Buchenwald, Max Temkin became a lifelong enemy of hate
Holocaust survivor, Max Temkin, most recently of Setauket, New York, was part of a delegation that brought back soil from concentration camps to place under the Eternal Flame of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He died May 22, several weeks after suffering a stroke on his 99th birthday, March 27. Max was born in…
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A requiem for the backyard minyan
The outdoor minyan was a symbol of Jewish resourcefulness and resilience
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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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Books For the Jews of Venice, an uneasy history of scapegoating and grudging tolerance
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