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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He was the father of anti-Semitic publishing in America
While I was researching a 19th century Jewish immigrant, Google, in its infinite, algorithmic wisdom, brought me to a white supremacist website with a link to a book called “The American Jew: An Exposé of His Career.” The work, published in 1888, embodied anti-Semitism in its most base, rabid form: a vile portrait of dirty,…
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Wait — was the U.N. Secretary General quoting Bob Dylan or the Talmud?
Is U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres a Talmudic scholar or a Bob Dylan fan? Or both? Close students of Dylan and the Talmud immediately recognized Guterres’s assessment that “a wind of madness is sweeping the globe” as an allusion to one or both of these original sources. In Tractate Sotah 3a of the Talmud, Reysh Lakish…
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Screenwriter for Garbo, savior for exiles fleeing Hitler
The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood By Donna Rifkind Other Press, 560 pages, $30 Imagine this alternate history of movies: Had Hitler not become a political force during the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin rather than Hollywood could have been the epicenter of film. So many…
The Latest
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George Steiner, critic of Israel and literature, dies at 90
George Steiner, the celebrated and polarizing literary critic whose work was shaded by the specter of the Shoah, died February 3 at his home in Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He was 90. A contemporary of Harold Bloom, a defender of the Western Canon and a fierce advocate of what he termed “Old Criticism,” Steiner…
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Film & TV These were the first Jewish winners at the Academy Awards
A radical Zionist Chicago newspaperman, a Belfast-born translator and a literary adapter par excellence. These were the first Jews who won Oscars at the inaugural Academy Awards in 1929. The three men — writers Ben Hecht and Benjamin Glazer and director Lewis Milestone — were connected by more than heritage. Working in the still-new world…
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Books What books should Jared Kushner have read about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
White House senior advisor Jared Kushner was widely mocked after telling Sky News Arabia that he was qualified to propose a new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan because he had “read 25 books” about the conflict. While the White House refused to tell the Forward what those books were, our reporting uncovered four of them. But it…
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Recovered Sobibor photos tell a striking story of complicity
The Nazis leveled the Sobibor death camp, located around 120 miles to the southeast of Warsaw, in 1943, after 600 prisoners killed a dozen members of the SS in an October uprising. The Reich ordered the camp closed down, and the surviving officers and auxiliary guards destroyed the evidence of the atrocities committed there since…
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Books The history of Hasidism: A New History by those who wrote it
Editor’s Note: In 2018, the Forward published this essay raising concerns about female representation in Jewish Studies, focused on a 2017 book about Hasidism. One of its authors responded this month with a broader critique of diversity in the field. The original critics then had another take, and now more of the authors are responding….
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A Philip Glass pop quiz
Philip Glass turns 83 today. In honor of the prolific composer’s achievements in music for stage and screen, here is a quiz about the minutiae of Glass’s life and work — assembled (how else?) in modular parts. I. MINIMALIST EXPERIMENTS AND THE BIRTH OF GLASS’S ‘INTENTIONLESS MUSIC’ Philip Glass, who is generally regarded as a…
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In first trailer, ‘The Plot Against America’ looks to rewrite the book
The story goes that Philip Roth was reading the autobiography of historian Arthur Schlesinger, when he stopped short. ”I came upon a sentence in which Schlesinger notes that there were some Republican isolationists who wanted to run Lindbergh for president in 1940,” Roth recalled in 2004. “That’s all there was, that one sentence with its…
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Auschwitz exhibition strikes New York archbishop silent
One day after the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, faith leaders from around New York City gathered to view artifacts from the former death camp. “We are very focused on being part of a broader effort to educate people of all faiths,” said Jack Kliger, the president and CEO of the Museum of…
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