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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They were a kosher bakery success story — 80 years later, people are still trying to make a buck off their babka
The tale of Schick's Bakery is one of 20th-century ingenuity and 21st-century capitalism
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80 Years Ago Today, Hitler Threatened Genocide Of European Jews — Was Anybody Listening?
January 30, 1939. Adolf Hitler had been chancellor of Germany for exactly six years. Thousands of Jews were already imprisoned in concentration camps. Legally defined as anyone possessing at least one Jewish grandparent, Jews were prohibited from marrying so-called Aryans, and had their businesses destroyed. But his annual speech to the Reichstag, Germany’s legislative body,…
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Art These Forgotten Women Artists Shaped Vienna’s Modernist Movement
In 1938 when the Germans annexed Austria, the art world suffered a major blow. Modernists like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt had their work labeled degenerate. Jewish artists were forced to flee and many more were unable to. One more casualty of the Anschluss is often overlooked — the many women sculptors and painters whose…
The Latest
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Art With Sackler Lawsuits Heating Up The Met Will Review Its Donor Policy
Following a new complaint against Purdue Pharma brought by the State of Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is reviewing its gift acceptance policy. The court filing, reported on by The New York Times last week, alleges that the Sackler family, the founders of Purdue Pharma and longtime donors to the Met, directed a misinformation…
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The Only Hummus Recipe You Will Ever Need
Editor’s Note: Following his pilgrimage to the Sabra Dipping Company plant, we asked author Orr Shtuhl to provide us with his secret recipe that made hummus a mainstay in the Shtuhl household. Shtuhl Family Hummus Recipe Although neither of my grandmothers made hummus at home, my parents, brother, and I make hummus using a method…
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Seeking Jewish Identity At The Sabra Hummus Factory
Three blue cornflowers, stenciled on white ceramic — for the 18 years I spent growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, that was my family’s emblem of hummus. The CorningWare dish, wide and stout, was the type you’d ordinarily see cradling a pot roast, or brimming with enough stuffing for Thanksgiving plus leftovers. But my parents,…
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Music Julia Wolfe’s Triangle Shirtwaist Oratorio Is Jarringly Cynical. That’s A Good Thing.
With the country in a dire state, there’s a conundrum facing artwork with progressive ideals: It’s easy for them to sound cursory, like Twitter activism, except onstage. That’s the difficulty that might have faced Julia Wolfe’s oratorio “Fire in my mouth,” which had its world premiere at the New York Philharmonic on January 24 and…
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Art Want To Buy A Hitler Self-Portrait? Tough Luck — It Might Be A Forgery.
In the art world, forgeries are an unfortunate inevitability; painters, sculptors and photographers are copied for their work’s cachet, artistic merit and monetary value. But it’s more rare for an artist to be imitated not for their talent, but for their extreme notoriety. Yet on January 24, police arrived at the Kloss auction house in…
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Art Her Father Was Hitler’s Architect. She Devoted Her Life To Helping Jewish Artists.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister and main architect, was known as “the Nazi who said sorry” for acknowledging his complicity in Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. While Speer maintained he never knew about the Holocaust, his daughter, Hilde Schramm, is spreading awareness of the genocide, and doing much more than apologizing for it….
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Of Course We Must ‘Write Our History’ — But Do We Need To Restage It?
After the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Nazi cameramen recorded countless rolls of film. Much of the material captured was repurposed for propaganda films that portrayed Europe’s Jewry as unhygienic, uncivilized and animalistic. While this documentary footage often relied on subjects that were not directed, the narrative and the conditions surrounding them were…
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An Epic German Oscar Nominee That Just Dares You To ‘Look Away’
In 2006, Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck’s first flick, “The Lives of Others,” walked off with an Oscar in the Foreign Language category (after beating out the much favored “Pan’s Labyrinth”). It was a focused, compelling film that explored the lives of two artists and the Stasi agent assigned to keep watch over them in the…
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Why Making Hebrew Nonbinary Is So Crucial
The Israeli poet Yona Wallach memorably wrote that “Hebrew is a sex maniac.” Wallach, who died in 1985, was no stranger to attention-grabbing subjects: One of her poems discusses sex with tefillin. Today, pronouns are a hot topic, and Wallach’s poem “Hebrew,” which explains why gender-neutral language is easier to accomplish in English, is the…
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