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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Your complete Jewish guide to watching the Oscars
The 92nd Academy Awards ceremony is already a Jewish affair. Though it hasn’t been advertised, the evening is not actually hostless; Elijah is slated to Emcee — the Academy is just waiting for him to show up for dress rehearsals. We jest, but film’s biggest night still has plenty of Yiddishkeit to offer. Jewish directors,…
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Film & TV ‘Incitement’ isn’t about making Rabin’s murderer — it’s about making modern Israel
We meet the killer as he’s cleaning tombstones. While he scrapes and sponges, his radio broadcasts Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s historic Rose Garden speech announcing the signing of the first Oslo Accord. When his work is done, he leaves to join protests against the peace plan in Tel Aviv. It’s 1993. In two years, this…
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The monumental effort of translating ‘Harry Potter’ into Yiddish
Read in Yiddish. When Arun Viswanath, the Yiddish translator of J. K. Rowling’s worldwide bestseller “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was 12 years old, he suddenly had a revelation that made him feel dejected. Although he’s a grandson of the venerable Yiddish linguist Mordkhe Schaechter, the son of the Yiddish poet Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, and…
The Latest
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Remembering Kirk Douglas — a movie legend like no other
Kirk Douglas has passed away at the age of 103. In memory of his astounding career, we reprint this tribute to the movie legend who was born Issur Danielovich to immigrant parents. Kirk Douglas was both a movie legend and a Hollywood anomaly: a star divided. Most stars lodge in our collective consciousness. Douglas, while…
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‘Vienna Blood’ is the Jewish answer to your ‘Sherlock’ craving
The latest British import to PBS, “Vienna Blood,” is not about sausage. Its title is a nod to its setting, its grisly, sanguine concerns and to a waltz and operetta (Wiener Blut) by Johann Strauss the Younger. If you already knew that last part, this show is for you. The series, based on the “Liebermann…
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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…
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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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