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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A Holocaust story of incredible luck, breathtaking bravery and incalculable loss
My Name is Selma: The Remarkable Memoir of a Jewish Resistance Fighter and Ravensbrück Survivor By Selma van de Perre; translated by Alice Tetley-Paul and Anna Asbury Scribner, 224 pages, $27 And still the stories keep coming. At 98, Selma van de Perre has published her first book, a memoir about her activities in the…
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Babi Yar is a site of Jewish death. With a new synagogue, this architect vows to ‘bring back Jewish life’
On the haunted ground of Babi Yar, the walls of a synagogue are opening and closing like the pages of a pop-up book. Over the course of two nights in 1941, SS officers and their local Ukrainian allies murdered almost 34,000 Jews at this ancient ravine, perpetrating one of the largest and most infamous massacres…
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Will Seth Rogen’s very Jewish book upset Jews?
It’s been nine months since Seth Rogen agitated the Jewish community by expressing a sentiment increasingly common among his generation. You’d be forgiven for forgetting all about it. In August, the actor-writer appeared on Marc Maron’s podcast and said he was “fed a huge amount of lies about Israel” throughout his Jewish education. The backlash…
The Latest
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God Bless Irving Berlin!
Editor’s Note; This article was originally published in the Forward on September 20, 2012. To some lovers of classical American song, it may seem paradoxical that the Tin Pan Alley genius who created such goyish holiday classics as “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade” was born Israel Isidore Beilin in Belarus, Russia, the son of a…
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Antisemitism may be the least of Van Morrison’s problems on his wretched new album
There is not one single moment of wit, humor or self-reflection on Van Morrison’s execrable new album, “Latest Recording Project Volume 1” (is that “Volume 1” a promise or a threat?). Morrison gives full voice to his inner Karen throughout the album, kvetching about everything from COVID lockdowns, bad reviews, Facebook, and, insidiously, Jews who…
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Why Disraeli is the mensch England could use right now
Will the British prime minister who has been described as “an adventurer addicted to romance and careless about facts” please stand up? The same prime minister who had first made his reputation as a writer before becoming a politician, spices his parliamentary parlays with Latin phrases, and whose reputation as a chancer — a charlatan,…
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Does focusing on Van Morrison’s alleged antisemitism ignore a much bigger problem?
When does hypersensitivity about potential antisemitic slights promote or unnecessarily highlight Jew-hating tropes? If a septuagenarian Irish pop singer wrote a song claiming that “They are all rich” and “They are all stingy,” what sensible Jewish listeners would raise their hands and admit that the tune must be about Jews because, over the years, imbeciles…
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My mother’s survival story — Love and hope after the Holocaust
Miraculously, my mother did what almost no one else in her large family could: She survived WWII. She arrived at New York’s Ellis Island in 1946, still a teenager. Orphaned, dispossessed of everything and knowing no English, she lived first in Toronto with her older sister, Jean, who’d left Poland a decade before the war…
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Three Zabar’s dreams, one American nightmare, and other dispatches from more than nine decades on earth
Now that I’ve lived more than 90 years, at times I wonder what it would be like to be 100, or if I would want to live to be 100. I guess it would depend on what quality of life would accompany that age. Olivia De Havilland, the actress, lived to 104 and Kirk Douglas…
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Musician Yoke Lore thrives as a pandemic hermit. Here’s what he’s gotten done
The last real concert I attended, before the pandemic hit, was at the Sinclair in Cambridge. I was seeing a band called Yoke Lore — really just one guy, who plays electronic-inflected, danceable banjo music. I’d just gotten into the band, and was listening to a few songs on repeat, but I didn’t know much…
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Israeli Eurovision contestant Eden Alene doesn’t have time for pandemic hobbies
I began the interview with a question I ask almost everybody these days: “Do you have a pandemic hobby?” Eden Alene looked at me, politely confused. “What is a pandemic hobby?” “You know,” I said, thinking of all my failed sourdough starters. “A lot of people learned to do new things because they had so…
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