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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Film & TV
A cult Israeli rock opera seeks cult movie success
Anti-war messages, as much electric guitar riffs, are a common theme of rock musicals from “Hair” to “American Idiot.” It’s no surprise that Israel has a peacenik rock opera, too, but you may find yourself bewildered by what it has to say. Keren Yedaya’s “Red Fields” (2019), which opens the New York Sephardic Film Festival…
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The curator of the Polish Jewish museum wins $500k award – here’s her story
In late January, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett received a call from an unfamiliar Israeli number. It was the president of Tel Aviv University, informing her she had received an award of half a million dollars. “It’s like a TV show when they call you completely out of the blue,” said Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator…
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About that Pete Buttigieg Bernie Sanders essay…
WRITER’S NOTE: During a February 2020 Democratic debate in Nevada, NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Mayor Pete Buttigieg about a 2000 essay he wrote in praise of Bernie Sanders. “The qualities I admired then are qualities I still respect a great deal,” Buttigieg responded. “I never said that I agree with every part of his policy…
The Latest
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‘West Side Story’ is opening on Broadway. She’s 17, and leading protests against it.
Ivo van Hove’s Broadway revival of “West Side Story,” a risky reinvention of one of the 20th century’s most beloved musicals, was always supposed to make headlines. But in the final weeks of previews, as a small but committed group of protestors staged ongoing protests outside the theater, an unplanned story began to take hold….
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Why Theodor Herzl still matters
Theodor Herzl did not live to see Israel realized, but he is arguably the country’s most enduring visionary. In less than a decade, before his early death in 1904, at the age of 44, Herzl lifted the Zionist movement from obscurity to a palpable political force through his magnetism and dedication. Many Israelis and Zionists…
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From the heart of Israel, a voice for Iranians
In the early hours of January 3rd, the journalist Menashe Amir had been sleeping when a colleague woke him up with explosive news: an American drone had fired on the Baghdad airport, killing Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani. Amir, who is 80, rushed out of bed and into his home office in Har Adar, an Israeli…
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It’s Nazis vs. Nazi hunters in Amazon’s comic book revenge fantasy
The opening credits of Amazon’s “Hunters,” a new series about a crew of Nazi-killing avengers in late 1970s New York, unfold over the backdrop of a chess board. The game’s hand-painted pieces take on the shape of the central players — a bloodied young man with a knife, a black woman with an afro and…
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At 99, a survivor tells his daring tale of heroism
The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground By Justus Rosenberg William Morrow, 288 pages, $28.99 In 1937, with Nazi violence disrupting Jewish life in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), Justus Rosenberg’s parents sent him to Paris to pursue his studies. He was just 16, and it would be 15 years before he…
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Poland’s Jewish Museum director is stepping aside — why now?
“It’s been almost a year since I left the museum, actually,” said Professor Dariusz Stola. “I waited quite patiently, I must say.” Stola was formerly the director of POLIN, Poland’s Jewish museum in Warsaw, until February 2019, when his five-year contract ended. For a year, he took no other job, hoping that he would be…
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A museum devoted to Southern Jewish culture to open in fall of 2020
For 26 years, the only museum devoted to Jewish life throughout the American South operated on the grounds of a Reform summer camp in Utica, Miss. Since opening its doors in 1986, the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience was a hub for Southern Jews looking to get in touch with their region’s vibrant past…
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Susan B. Anthony’s Jewish Sisters
February 15 marks the bicentenary of the American social reformer Susan B. Anthony. Deemed an “incomparable organizer” by historian Eleanor Flexner Anthony grew up in a Quaker family that possessed only a handful of history books. Yet these included two different editions, in two and six volumes respectively, of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who…
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Fast Forward Connie Francis, 20th-century star turned TikTok sensation, recorded an album of Jewish songs in 1960
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