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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Return To The Reich
“Return to the Reich” tells the story of a harrowing US espionage mission into Nazi-occupied Austria led by Freddy Mayer, who had escaped Nazi Germany for Brooklyn as a teenager in 1938. Mayer, with another Jewish refugee from Europe as his radio man on the mission, posed for weeks on the ground in Tyrol as…
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Here Are The Winners Of Israel’s National Yiddish Story Contest
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In July, Israel’s National Authority for Yiddish Culture launched the first government-sponsored Yiddish-language writing contest ever held in the Jewish state. This week, the authority announced the three winners. Ethel Niborski, age 17, won first prize for her short story “Letters to a Blind Grandfather,” for which…
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Carolyn Forché, Ilya Kaminsky Among National Book Award Finalists
Finalists for the National Book Awards, winners of which will be announced on November 20, include Ilya Kaminsky, László Krasznahorkai and Carolyn Forché. Kaminsky, a Ukrainian-born Jewish poet, is nominated for “Deaf Republic,” his second full-length poetry collection. Krasznahorkai, a Jewish Hungarian novelist, is a finalist in the category of fiction in translation, for his…
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Film & TV How I Stole Chantal Akerman’s Ideas For the Obama White House
Editor’s note: Filmmaker Chantal Akerman passed away on this date in 2015. To commemorate her life and work, we are revisiting this essay by Arun Chaudhary that speaks to Akerman’s wide-ranging impact. When I met Chantal Akerman, the famed film director whose alleged suicide was reported on October 6, I told her I was going…
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About That Time Jesus Fought Hitler On ‘Preacher’
The Platinum Age of television has given us has given us the Jesus-Hitler showdown we didn’t know we wanted — and it’s not even pay-per-view. Spoilers ahead. Last Sunday, on the series finale of “Preacher,” the Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen-produced AMC adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s comic of the same name, the…
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History Of Buster Keaton
Editor’s Note: Buster Keaton was born on this day in 1895. In honor of the 124th birthday of “The Great Stone Face, we look back on Keaton’s Jewish influences and collaborators. Had it not been for Erik Weisz, the Hungarian-born, Wisconsin-raised son of a rabbi, one of the most influential film artists of all time…
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Bob Woodward Booed At Shul For Talking Over Weinstein Reporters
On October 2 at the Sixth & I synagogue in Washington, DC, celebrated investigative journalist Bob Woodward interviewed Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein sex abuse story. It didn’t go so well. According to audience members who posted their reactions to social media, Woodward, whose…
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Folksbiene Names Dominick Balletta As New Executive Director
The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the 104-year-old New York-based company specializing in productions of Yiddish-language drama, announced on October 3 that Dominick Balletta, a veteran of film and theater management, will be the company’s new executive director. Balletta, currently the managing director of the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, will returning to…
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The Gift Nadine Gordimer Gave to Me
Editor’s Note: On this date in 1991, the author Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature. To commemorate that anniversary, we return to this essay by National Jewish Book Award-winning author Kenneth Bonert, written on the occasion of Gordimer’s passing in 2014. There is one quality that is perhaps more important to a writer…
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Could It Be Time For A Yiddish ‘Porgy And Bess?’
Suppose, instead of adapting the white Southerner DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel “Porgy,” the Russian-Jewish American composer George Gershwin took on the Russian-Jewish Russian writer Isaac Babel’s 1926 play “Sunset.” Imagine a Gershwin folk opera set in a Jewish ghetto, rather than African-American slum, not populated by the poor people and criminals of Catfish Row but…
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5 Months After His Selection, The Director Of The Polish Jewish Museum Waits To Be Reinstated – Here’s Why
When it opened in 2014, POLIN: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw, was a landmark achievement. It took the participation of three separate bodies — the Polish national government, the city of Warsaw and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland — and over 20 years of talks for…
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