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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Remembering Anne Douglas, a woman of charity and a late convert to Judaism
Anne Buydens Douglas, who died April 29 at age 102, collaborated with her husband Kirk Douglas in extraordinarily generous philanthropic ventures. The couple, both of whom reached their centenary, showed that advanced age can be accompanied by heightened humanistic values. Born Hannelore Marx in Hanover, Germany, to a family of wealthy industrialists, she acquired business…
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Why Jews are still crazy about mahjong
From the 1920s until today, mahjong has captured the imagination of American Jewish players like few other games. Annelise Heinz, who teaches at the University of Oregon, is the author of “Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture.” Recently, I spoke with Heinz about what mahjong has meant to Jewish communities….
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How Jewish TikTokers are trying to reclaim an antisemitic trend
“If I Were a Rich Man” is one of the most iconic songs from “Fiddler on the Roof.” In it, Tevye, borrowing from niggunim, a wordless Jewish meditative tune, dreams of a better life outside the shtetl. Unfortunately, the beloved song has been turned into a flourishing antisemitic trend on TikTok, spawning more than 25,000…
The Latest
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What almost saved — but ultimately doomed — peace in the Middle East
Yasser Arafat once insisted on cutting up Dennis Ross’s chicken during a dinner; Ross was then head of the American effort to arbitrate peace between Israel and Palestine. At the time, it seemed like a sign of hospitality and hope — Ross joked that Arafat had “a Jewish mother syndrome.” These days, after the Human…
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How Blake Bailey embodied Philip Roth’s spirit — and betrayed his legacy
When I spoke last month with Blake Bailey, the disgraced author of Philip Roth’s biography, I asked one question that seemed to shock him. It wasn’t the one about what he had to say to critics who suggested his biography of Roth was marred by deep misogyny. Bailey — whose book has been permanently pulled…
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After Kristallnacht, a hunger artist confronts a splintering world
The Passenger By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz; translated by Philip Boehm; preface by André Aciman Henry Holt and Company/Metropolitan Books, 266 pages, $24.99 A feverish urgency infuses Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s rediscovered novel about a frantic German Jewish businessman after Kristallnacht, an internal refugee whose doomed travels both echoed and prefigured the author’s own. Boschwitz’s Jewish father…
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The youngest Yiddish ‘Fiddler’ cast member on making a new tradition
Samantha Hahn was the youngest member of the critically-acclaimed National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene production of “Fiddler on the Roof” (she played Tevye’s youngest, Beylke). She’s also an author. In advance of a NYTF book party and discussion May 2, we are excerpting from her book “On the Roof: A Look Inside Fiddler on the Roof…
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Books Norton pulls Philip Roth biography from print after author accused of sexual assault
The publisher W.W. Norton has pulled its recently-released biography of Philip Roth from print after multiple women accused its author, Blake Bailey, of sexual assault. The Associated Press reported that Norton would stop printing of “Philip Roth: The Biography,” a much hyped, 912-page treatise on the author’s life, as well as Bailey’s 2014 memoir “The…
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In gentrified Greenwich Village, one link remains to a Jewish folk past
In 2017, Amanda Foley, the location scout for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” needed a place to shoot a record store scene. It’s a challenge to find interiors that fit the storyline of the series’ main character Midge Maisel, a wealthy Jewish housewife who dives into the Village scene of the late 50s and early 60s….
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James Carville tells Democrats to ‘start speaking Yiddish’
James Carville thinks Yiddish should be the language of voter outreach. Well, kind of. In an interview with Vox, the longtime political consultant and “Muppets” cast member expressed his concern about “jargon-y language” surrounding subjects like race, suggesting a more accessible form of messaging for Democrats. “I always tell people that we’ve got to stop…
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Is Netflix’s newest Israeli import too American to succeed in America?
Aside from the Hebrew, “Blackspace,” the Israeli thriller just acquired by Netflix for international distribution, feels like it’s set in America. It takes place in a blandly unidentifiable high school building. The kids are all secular, dressed in crop tops and shorts — not a kippah to be seen. And, most American of all, the…
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