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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50 years a feminist, and I’m still learning what suffrage means
I cast my first vote in 1945, when I was five. My mother led me behind the curtain, picked me up so I could reach the levers, pointed to the name William O’Dwyer on the voting machine, and let me do the honors. But first, she told me why “we” wanted O’Dwyer to be the…
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The suffrage movement was racist. Where did Jewish women fit in?
Hilary Danailova’s recent cheerfully titled article “Jewish Suffragists, White Dresses and Yellow Roses” in Hadassah Magazine is intriguing. Jewish suffragists? As a woman who is Jewish and Black, whose mother was a refugee from Nazi Austria and father was from Jamaica, I have always known that the overwhelmingly white Protestant leadership and their followers in…
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Suffrage comes with obligations. Voting is only the first.
Women have had the right to vote in the United States for 100 years. We should celebrate that, but our understanding of what exactly this right entails remains superficial. Many think that the right to vote is in itself sufficient: If they have in fact voted, they think, they have exercised this right and fulfilled…
The Latest
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Why I won’t celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment
Mention to me that you’re celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment, and you might notice a slight cringe. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve just finished a book about the history of Black women and the vote, so I am as interested as anyone in this anniversary and its significance to the nation’s past. But…
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The Eastern European Jewish immigrant who saved suffrage
On August 8, 1920, a freshman legislator from Tennessee, Joseph Hanover, was summoned to the elegant Hermitage Hotel in Nashville by Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. A friend and longtime ally of Susan B. Anthony, Catt had been pushing for women’s suffrage since the 1880s, and had assumed leadership…
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Why have Jewish suffragists been left out of history?
This year, leading up to the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, newspapers, podcasts, documentaries and museum exhibitions — indeed, three in the nation’s capital alone — have been filled with stories of the brave women who, for three-quarters of a century, fought for the vote. But Jewish women rarely appear in these…
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The one thing critics, directors and film nerds get wrong about Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker by David Mikics Yale University Press, 248 pp, $26.00 When cinephiles compare Stanley Kubrick to God, they mean the fire-and-brimstone, all-knowing, all-powerful version. To me, he seems more like H.L Mencken’s God, a comedian performing for an audience too scared to laugh. Better yet, a drill sergeant performing insult comedy for…
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Bernie Sanders’ wall of wood has a surprising Jewish significance
On the first night of the socially-distant 2020 Democratic National Convention, Bernie Sanders held forth before a backdrop that put any Zoom background to shame. Flanked by an American flag and the Vermont state flag, Sanders painted a stark picture of the country’s slide in totalitarianism before a wall of chopped wood. It was so…
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October 27: 25 Years After Rabin – Can Israel be both Jewish and democratic?
This talk will take place on Tuesday, October 27 at 2:00 p.m. ET/ 11:00 a.m. PT. Register here. November 4 marks the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin, an event that crystalized the tension between Judaism and democracy that is imprinted in Israel’s DNA. As the debate over the freedom…
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Will the new ‘Dirty Dancing’ live up to the original’s brave look at abortion?
There’s a long and sordid history of failed attempts to replicate the cinematic success of the 1980s blockbuster “Dirty Dancing.” A 2004 prequel, “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights,” yielded dismal numbers at the box office. A 2017 made-for-TV remake inspired disgusted takedowns like this one. Time and again, audiences have told Hollywood that it is impossible…
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He fled Jim Crow — then risked his future for two Holocaust survivors
Lieutenant John Withers had every reason to say no. The army, though segregated, was his only realistic shot at a better life. As an aspiring professor, Withers hoped the GI Bill would help him get a Ph.D., and maybe — just maybe — escape the fate that America had written for him. But a dishonorable…
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