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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In ‘Border of Pain,’ There Are No Saviors
Trundling through checkpoints on a dusty West Bank road, an Israeli doctor sporting jaunty aviators points out the nearby settlement of Einav. In the 1960s it housed a paratrooper base, where he served as a medic. “I’m glad to see the base is gone,” he tells Ruth Walk, an Israeli documentarian and the director of…
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The Refugee War Reporter Who Brought ‘Doctor Zhivago’ To The West
Over the past decade, the remarkable story of the international late 1950s effort to defy Soviet censors and secure publication of “Doctor Zhivago” has focused on the role played by western spies and spooks. But while the CIA secretly worked to smuggle bootleg copies of Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece back into the Soviet Union — a…
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Poland Tussles With Netflix Over Concentration Camp Map In Holocaust Series
JTA — Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote a letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings regarding “historical inaccuracies in film productions on this platform.” The letter was in response to the series “The Devil Next Door,” which tells the story of Ivan Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian guard at the Treblinka death camp. One episode of the…
The Latest
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The Most Incredible Stories You Never Heard About Harry Houdini
Harry Houdini is the immortal alter ego of the late Hungarian-Jewish immigrant Ehrich Weiss, the son of a rabbi and an incomparable mama’s boy. Many of the marvels of Houdini’s life, due in part to his own self-mythologizing, are, likewise, so much hocus pocus. “Nobody created myths like him,” Joe Posnanski, the author of the…
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Music The Secret Jewish History of The Who
Editor’s Note: On the occasion of The Who’s first new album in 13 years, we look back at the band’s secret Jewish history, which we first explored in 2015. If The Who’s visionary songwriter and guitarist Pete Townshend had had his way, “Tommy” — an allegory about a traumatized messiah — would not have been…
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The Gorgeous, Grungy New York Values Of ‘Sesame Street’
If you want to really understand “Sesame Street,” watch any segment in which Oscar the Grouch springs out from the tin can he calls home to sing about how much he loves trash. He’s done so many times over the decades, starting in 1970 during the show’s very first season, when a gleeful Oscar —…
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Roman Polanski Accused Of 1975 Rape
New allegations of rape have emerged against fugitive director Roman Polanski, and Polanski is threatening legal action against the paper that ran the story. On November 8, the French publication Le Parisien ran a story in which French photographer and former actress Valentine Monnier claimed that she was raped by Polanski at his property in…
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Woody Allen And Amazon Settle Breach Of Contract Lawsuit
Woody Allen and Amazon have agreed to a settlement in the $68 million breach of contract lawsuit the embattled filmmaker brought against the streaming and retail giant this past February. On Friday, Variety reports, lawyers for Allen and Amazon filed a joint notice dismissing the case. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Allen’s…
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Evidence Of Human-Neanderthal Hybrids Found In Israeli Cave
Long before the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, early men and women were living in Eretz Yisrael. Newly-unearthed relics reveal that some of these people may have traveled great distances before settling there — and that some of them weren’t 100% human. Teeth found in the Manot Cave in Western Galilee show features of both Homo sapiens…
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How Michael Bloomberg Keeps Reinventing Himself
Author’s Note: This interview originally ran on September 16, 2019. On Thursday, news broke that Michael Bloomberg was preparing to enter the 2020 presidential race. The businessman and former Republican mayor of New York (who will be running as a Democrat), has long been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump’s administration. In this article,…
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The Third Reich’s Secret Expedition To Whale In Antarctica
Here’s a whale of a tale: In 1938, Hitler planned a covert expedition to Antarctica for the purposes of securing a direct supply line of whale fat. His reasons were both predictably martial and puzzlingly culinary in nature. Of all the political and social trends that preceded Hitler’s rise, one gastronomical development may come as…
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