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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In the shtetl of I.B. Singer’s youth, the ghosts of his past live on
In his 1978 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer employed memories from his earliest years as a source of hope for coping with the troubles of modern times: “In our home and in many other homes the eternal questions were more actual than the latest news in the Yiddish newspaper,”…
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How Slovakia’s Oscars contender revived two forgotten Holocaust heroes — an interview with Peter Bebjak
When Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba escaped Auschwitz in 1944, they didn’t just save themselves. The two men, both Slovak Jews, used data secretly compiled during their time as sonderkommandos in Auschwitz to write the eponymous Wetzler-Vrba report, which provided one of the first eyewitness accounts of the death camp’s infamous gas chambers. Publicized by…
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In a heartbreaking tribute to his son, Jamie Raskin normalizes discussion of suicide among Jews
Tommy Raskin was, by all accounts, a deeply empathetic individual, whether fighting on behalf of humans or animals. His father, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, wrote in a statement published on Medium that his son “hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious…
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‘Star Wars’ fanboy. Bar mitzvah boy. Senator? Jews react to Jon Ossoff’s path to victory
At press time, Jon Ossoff, a 33-year-old documentary film producer, is within striking distance of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate and flipping it blue. And while some reflected on the significance of this moment in a deep south plagued by historical antisemitism, a bunch more people were moved to make fun of Ossoff’s…
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Why Trump wasn’t the first Republican to appropriate Aaron Copland
An instance of presidential plagiarism provides a good occasion for considering how Aaron Copland, a gay Jewish leftist composer from Brooklyn, managed to create works of such unsurpassed Americana that they are even coveted by homophobic, antisemitic, quasi-Fascist wannabes. Minions of the current occupant of the White House recently released a post-campaign TV advertisement, which…
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Long after the Kindertransport, the trauma remained
The Berlin Shadow: Living with the Ghosts of the Kindertransport By Jonathan Lichtenstein Little, Brown Spark, 311 pages, $28 Destroyed and divided, then rebuilt and reunified, Berlin is at once defiantly modern and haunted by history. In Jonathan Lichtenstein’s memoir, “The Berlin Shadow,” the city’s ghosts are even more present and powerful in its cafés…
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When Joan Micklin Silver foresaw the future of media
Editor’s note: Joan Micklin Silver, the director of “Between the Lines,” died Dec. 31 at the age of 85. As a tribute to her trailblazing career, we’re reviving this February 2019 reappraisal of her 1977 ensemble film, which helped launch young talents Jeff Goldblum, John Heard and Marilu Henner while offering a prescient commentary on…
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Ken Jennings opens up a whole other can of beans defending co-host’s antisemitism
Would you let your daughter spend six hours figuring out how to operate a can opener so she could eat baked beans, without helping her? And would you consider someone who did this an abusive parent? This was the topic of this weekend’s Twitter kerfuffle, now trending as “Bean Dad.” John Roderick tweeted about his…
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Trump’s favorite Yiddish words should come as a surprise to no one
Like most New Yorkers of his generation, Donald Trump has a few Yiddish words in his back pocket. Because he’s Donald Trump, those words are limited and — by most accounts — phallocentric. On Jan. 3, The Washington Post reportedthat Trump deployed a well-known Yiddish vulgarity in a recorded conversation with Georgia Secretary of State…
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Were Freud and Mario Cuomo right about work?
We were on Delta 436 out of Memphis heading south to Cozumel, Mexico. Steven, my oldest son, and I have been taking annual scuba and snorkeling trips together for the past several years. Destinations have been Caribbean ports where the fish, coral and sea grass were exceptional to behold. Steve had a window seat, I…
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How Joan Micklin Silver captured the spirit of the Jewish immigrant experience
Joan Micklin Silver, who died on Dec. 31 at age 85, proved that for American Jewish women, being a film director means facing challenges of assimilation not unlike those confronted by immigrant ancestors generations ago. Silver based “Hester Street” (1975) on the novella “Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto” (1896) by Abraham Cahan,…
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Yiddish ווי ייִדישע קינדער־ליטעראַטור האָט געזאָלט העלפֿן קינדער פֿאַרשטיין די וועלטHow Yiddish children’s literature aimed to help kids make sense of the world
די אַמאָליקע קינדערביכער האָבן אָפּגעשפּיגלט כּלערליי פּאָליטישע וויזיעס און אויך אַ נײַעם פֿאַרשטאַנד פֿון קינדער און משפּחה־לעבן.
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