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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The Secret Jewish History Of ‘Death Wish’
It has been forty-five years since the first “Death Wish” movie was released. It has a surprisingly rich yet hidden Jewish history. Before becoming as a movie franchise that has lasted for six films between 1974 and 2018, “Death Wish” started life as a 1972 novel with a Jewish protagonist. Brian Garfield’s book of the…
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Inside The 1949 Westchester KKK Attack Where Rioters Chanted ‘We’re Hitler’s Boys’
This article was originally published on September 2, 2009. It was re-published for the 70th anniversary of the Peekskill Riots on August 26, 2019, and lightly edited to reflect the new anniversary of the event. Peekskill, New York, on the bank of the Hudson River, was home to L. Frank Baum, the author of “The…
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Why Everything You Think You Know About Christian Zionism Is Wrong
'Christian Zionists do not secretly want to convert Jews; in fact many argue vociferously against missionizing'
The Latest
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For The Anniversary Of The Hitler-Stalin Pact, A Look Back
Editor’s note: This piece, included in Ada Pagis’s collection of short fiction “A History Lesson” and translated into English by Tsipi Keller, was originally published on August 19, 2011. It was republished on August 23, 2019 to acknowledge the week of the 80th anniversary of Hitler and Stalin’s non-aggression pact. In the German war archives,…
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How Refugee Artists Processed Their Displacement During The Nazis’ March Toward War
In the late 1930s, as the global threat of Nazism accelerated, a number of Jewish artists fled en masse from Germany and Austria, seeking safe harbor wherever they could. “The Art of Exile: Paintings by German-Jewish Refugees,” an exhibit by The Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History that began in June, tells…
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Objections Grow As Germany Rebuilds Church With Historical Nazi Ties
Since 2017, the Garrison Church in Potsdam, Germany has been in the process of being rebuilt and restored to its pre-1945 appearance. The 18th century church was damaged during an allied bombing in April 1945, and was later demolished on the order of East German authorities in 1968. But before those events, the church was…
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The Long And Violent History Of Anti-Semitic ‘Disloyalty’ Charges
In 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte summoned French Jewish leaders for a conversation about loyalty. French Jews had gained the status of full citizens 16 years earlier. Napoleon wanted to understand how, as newly empowered civilians, they saw the world. So he asked them if they truly considered France their country, and Frenchmen their countrymen. In 1894,…
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Woody Allen’s ‘Rainy Day’ To Open French Festival
Almost two years after wrapping principle photography, Woody Allen’s “A Rainy Day In New York” will play its first festival — about four-thousand miles away from New York. Allen’s film, starring Elle Fanning, Timothée Chalamet and Jude Law, was selected to open the Deauville American Film Festival in Deauville, France on September 9, Deadline reports….
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By Telling Art Spiegelman To Ditch A Trump Reference, Marvel Betrayed Its Own History
For the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, comics — for all their pulpy origins — are a political art form. Spiegelman, author of the serialized graphic novel “Maus,” is something of an elder statesman of the form. He’s also a scholar of its history. So when the Folio Society, a London publisher of glossy illustrated…
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Barry Manilow’s Original Musical Is Coming To The Folksbiene
Barry Manilow has a particular talent for upbeat — and unserious — musical storytelling. His easy-listening songs are populated by showgirls named Lola and men named Rico who wear diamonds, as featured in his iconic “Copacabana,” or balladeers lamenting the loss of a legendarily selfless lover, as in “Mandy.” His famed “Stuck on a Band-Aid”…
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Remembering Sasson Somekh, Who Insisted On Arab Literature’s Place In Israel
Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on September 22, 2012. It was republished on August 19, 2019 after Sasson Somekh’s death at age 86. Translations have the potential to communicate one culture to another, strengthening humanistic ties. Translators can be peacemakers, self-abnegatingly finding compromises in the perilous confrontation of languages. No one exemplified this…
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