Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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The Secret Jewish History of The Rolling Stones
About five years ago, The Rolling Stones — who performed their first ever concert in London on this date in 1992 — took the stage at HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv. That event represented more than just the world’s greatest and longest-running rock band’s first concert in Israel. It also marked one small victory in the war…
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Items From The Anne Frank House Are On Display In America For The First Time Ever
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is a major resource for the millions of people who have been captivated by Frank’s story. The home, where Frank, her family, the three-person van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer hid from the Nazis in a secret annex between 1942 and 1944, has become a site of pilgrimage since…
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Award-Winning Memoirist Lucette Lagnado Dies At 62
Lucette Lagnado, the award-winning author who documented her family’s exodus from Egypt to America, has died at 62. The Jewish Book Council, which awarded Lagnado the Sami Rohr Prize in 2008, announced her passing. Lagnado was born to a Jewish family in Cairo in 1956. In 1963, during a wave of mass exodus by Jews…
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A Young Argentine-Jewish Filmmaker Takes On His Country’s Authoritarian Past
Benjamín Naishtat’s “Rojo” begins with what seems like a wish-fulfillment fantasy of a very specific sort. Claudio (Argentine actor Dario Grandinetti, of such films as Almodóvar’s “Talk to Her”), a lawyer in a provincial Argentine town in the mid-1970s, is waiting for his wife at a nice, if modest, local restaurant. He’s approached by an…
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No One’s Studying Hebrew Anymore — That’s A Big Problem
College enrollment in Hebrew courses is dropping sharply, and this downward spiral may soon have profound effects on the American Jewish community. Modern Hebrew enrollment fell 17.6 percent between 2013 and 2016, according to a report from the Modern Languages Association, while Biblical Hebrew suffered a 23.9% decline. The number of Hebrew students has been…
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Philip Roth’s Estate Auction Shows His Simple, Sturdy, American Side
You can now own Philip Roth’s Balinese shadow puppet, area rugs or Pat and Richard Nixon collectible plate. Litchfield County Auctions, which runs estate auctions for the Connecticut county in which Roth lived part-time for decades, has posted a lineup of over 100 items owned by the Pulitzer-winning author, who died in May of 2018….
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Happy 89th Birthday, Harold Bloom!
Harold Bloom, the American Jewish literary critic, has divided opinions during his extremely prolific career, from adulation to obloquy. His landmark books speak for themselves, including “The Anxiety of Influence” (1973),, “A Map of Misreading” (1975), “Agon (1982), “Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible” (1989), and “The Western Canon” (1994), An…
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Woody Allen: ‘I Would Probably Die On A Film Set’
Woody Allen plans to die in the director’s chair. “Since I started, I’ve always tried to focus on my work, no matter what happens in my family or with politics. I don’t think about social movements,” Allen told press at San Sebastian, Spain on July 9, a day before he began filming a new project,…
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Midnight Movie Maven And Coen Brothers Patron Ben Barenholtz Dies At 83
Film producer and distributor Ben Barenholtz, who spent his youth hiding from Nazis in the Ukrainian woods and grew up to popularize midnight movie screenings, died June 27 at a Prague hospital. He was 83. His death was reported by his executor, Sony Pictures Classics executive Tom Prassis, who said that Barenholtz, who had been…
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The Astonishingly Menschy Side Of Bob Dylan
Dylan & Me: 50 Years of Adventures By Louie Kemp, with a foreword by Kinky Friedman West Rose Press 240 pages It’s a story familiar to anyone who ever attended summer camp. You hit it off with another kid, mostly over a shared sense of humor and mutual feelings of being slightly different than the…
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How An 8th-Century Jewish Text Ended Up In A Buddhist Cave Temple In China
Approaching the Mogao Grottoes in Gansu, a province in northwest China, it’s hard to imagine the sights that lie in store. The holes in the cliff can appear, from a distance, to be nothing more than a strange rock formation etched into the face of a sand-beaten desert ridge. It is only as you get…
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