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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Monolith discovered in Utah wilderness has strong ‘2001’ energy
It’s a mystery some cinephiles may not want solved: Who — or what — placed a towering metal monolith in the middle of Utah desert? On Nov. 18, officers for Utah’s Department of Public Safety discovered the 10 to 12-foot tall edifice, which looks like a stainless steel prototype of Stanley Kubrick’s famously cryptic monolith…
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A new box set of Yiddish films arrives – but only on Blu-Ray
Read this article in Yiddish. Today, 10 fully-restored classics of Yiddish cinema, featuring new commentary tracks and subtitles, will be available in a box set for the first time. But you may not be able to watch them. “This is coming out strictly on Blu-Ray,” said Allen Lewis Rickman, an actor and Yiddishist who wrote…
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Why Bob Dylan preferred I.B. Singer over Jack Kerouac
One Singer story 'stayed in my head for months afterward,' Dylan said.
The Latest
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What Antony Blinken’s band says about how he’ll lead as Secretary of State
It is all but certain that Antony Blinken, former U.S. deputy secretary of state under Barack Obama, will be the nation’s top diplomat in the Biden administration. If nominated, he will be the third Jew to hold the post after Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. He will — we think — be the first to…
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Against all odds, Holocaust survivors retain their optimism — and their music
Directed by Tod Lending, “Saul & Ruby’s Holocaust Survivor Band” recounts the experiences of two Holocaust survivors, Saul Dreier, 91 and Ruby Sosnowicz, 87, who’ve joined forces to form a Klezmer Band that celebrates their survival — or, more to the point, how they’ve thrived despite enduring Holocaust atrocities. A testimony to optimism and resilience,…
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How Australia almost became a Jewish homeland
Growing up, I spent most of my time with my family at my grandparent’s farm in Western Australia. I didn’t know how unusual my grandfather was, with his shade house full of the roses and orchids he hybridized, with his robust singing of opera and his dry sense of humor. He was a polite, reserved…
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Jewish clergy rally in support of immigrants on hunger strike at New Jersey jail
Rabbi Avram Mlotek was washing dishes and listening to the radio when he heard that seven immigrant detainees had started a hunger strike at Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, New Jersey. “I’m from Bergen County, so that set off my antenna,” said Mlotek, who lives in Manhattan and leads BASE Hillel, a community outreach organization…
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Nice to have you back, Sophia Loren; sorry about the movie
“The Life Ahead,” Sophia Loren’s long-awaited return to feature film, has one, central, ugly, thudding metaphor at its center. About a third of the way through the treacly Netflix drama about a Muslim orphan and his aged Jewish caretaker, protagonist Momo (newcomer Ibrahima Gueye) peers around his bed to see a CGI lioness striding towards…
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Yes, he sold art to the Nazis — but was he a traitor or a hero?
“The Last Vermeer,” marking producer Dan Friedkin’s directorial debut, is part melodrama and part thriller, but at its core it’s an exploration of moral complexities that regrettably disappears into distracting subplots and a large cast of indistinguishable characters. By the time the viewer appreciates the complicated ethical and psychological questions at play, the film is…
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Sammy Davis Jr.’s daughter understood her father’s commitment to Judaism
Tracey Davis, the daughter of Sammy Davis Jr., who died on Nov. 2 at age 59, co-wrote two memoirs of her father, implying that as the proverb goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. From the mid-1950s onward, Hollywood stars including Carroll Baker, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor converted to Judaism, but Davis was…
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From the Holocaust, lessons in how to live today
When I was researching and writing “The Takeaway Men” — a novel about fraternal twin girls who were born in a DP camp in Germany after World War II and then brought to Queens, New York, as toddlers by their refugee parents — I never imagined that it would be published during a pandemic. Even…
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Culture I come from a long line of Jewish Bundists. Now, Molly Crabapple is part of our family.
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Fast Forward 200+ Bnei Menashe immigrate to Israel from India, the first to make the journey in years
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Yiddish װאָס קען מען זיך אָפּלערנען פֿון מאָלי קראַבעפּלס בוך װעגן „בונד“?What can we learn from Molly Crabapple’s book about the Bund?
דאָס בוך איז גרונטיק געפֿאָרשט, לעבעדיק אָנגעשריבן — אָבער אידעאָלאָגיש באַפֿאַרבט
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Sports Today’s American Jews finally have their era’s Sandy Koufax