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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Catching My Breath At Sinai On Rosh Hashanah
“Got a second?” I asked Dr. Doug, measuring the time with great care. I lay on a gurney and flipped on the speaker. The chief surgeon, his white coat identifying him as “Ram Reddy” stood over me. Ready. My ATT signal wasn’t working at Mount Sinai (the one on Madison Avenue and 101st Street) so…
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Barbara Probst Solomon Was A Fixture Of Literary New York — And My Friend
Barbara Probst Solomon, a prominent novelist and essayist, died on September 1. She was 90. I first met Barbara in Lyon, France at the 1987 trial of the SS interrogator Klaus Barbie, the infamous so-called “Butcher of Lyon.” She was covering the trial for the Spanish publication Cambio 16, and I was producing the Marcel…
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How Rod Serling Fought Injustice – And Nazis – On ‘The Twilight Zone’
Rod Serling wanted to fight Nazis; he missed his chance, but later got another. While he had hoped to enlist in the armed forces before his graduation from Binghamton Central High School in 1943, a teacher told him to wait. “He was sent to the Pacific; not where he had hoped,” his daughter Anne Serling…
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IMPEACH: Why The Word On Everyone’s Mind Means So Much More In Hebrew
Every article on impeachment insists that “impeach” does not mean to “remove” — but rather, in a quasi-Talmudic tone, the word means to “officially state the charges against a public official.” As law bloggers scrambled to parse the parameters of an “impeachable” offense, sounding a lot like the rabbis of two thousand years ago, the…
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In Nadav Lapid’s New Film, ‘Synonyms’ For Jewish Self-Hatred
It makes a certain sense that Yoav, the protagonist of Nadav Lapid’s film “Synonyms,” is more or less introduced to us with his penis out. Yoav has arrived in France to escape his Israeli identity, and his various attempts to capture “Frenchness” give the film its episodic shape. Backpack in tow, he arrives to an…
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November 16-17: Stockholm, Sweden: Yiddish Forward In The Digital Age At Limmud Stockholm
If a Swedish trip is in your near future, don’t miss Rukhl Schaechter, editor of the Yiddish Forward (Forverts), as she gives three talks at the Limmud Stockholm conference the weekend of November 16 and 17. The first talk, “How the Yiddish Forward Is Being Transformed in the Digital Age,” will delve into how Schaechter…
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EXCLUSIVE: The Soloway Siblings: Are Their Boundaries Your Triggers?
_Author’s Note: This article first appeared on January 21, 2019. Although they were already identifying as non-binary by then, their name change to Joey Soloway was still a little over a year away. To bring our interview up to date, I’ve made a few needed revisions to the original text. Growing up in the ‘70s…
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Music The Secret Jewish History of Olivia Newton-John
In a recent celebrity memoir, the author writes, “In 1933, my Jewish grandfather fled from Germany with his wife, Hedwig, to escape Hitler’s regime. He was not only a brilliant mind but also a humanitarian who helped Jews escape Germany. I’m extremely proud of my peace-loving grandfather.” The grandfather was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born,…
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‘Tell Them We Blew The Shofar At Auschwitz,’ He Said. 75 Years Later, She Did.
75 Rosh Hashanahs ago, in 1944, the sound of a shofar rang out at Auschwitz. Very few heard it. It was Rosh Hashanah, and as the Jewish year 5704 turned into 5705, Chaskel Tydor, a Jewish work dispatcher at Auschwitz III-Monowitz, arranged for a minyan of prisoners to be sent to an isolated part of…
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Music Doubling On The Shofar: A High Holiday Jazz Story
Since I was a boy, my musical heroes have been jazz musicians — Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, John Coltrane. My own trumpet playing was good enough to get me the solo chair in the school band, but my taste far outstripped my talent and I would never stoop to play in a band…
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In A Recently Unearthed Letter, Gandhi Says Shana Tova To An Indian Zionist
On September 1, 1939, the day the Nazis marched on Poland, Mahatma Gandhi, then the leader of the Indian Independence movement and a preacher of non-violent resistance, sat down to write a letter. “You have my good wishes for your new year,” the letter read. “How I wish the new year may mean an era…
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