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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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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Hal Fischer’s Groundbreaking Photos Of Gay Life In San Francisco Find Permanent Home
The photographer and critic Hal Fischer worked on the front lines of history, recording gay life in San Francisco in the 1970s in the period between the Stonewall riots and the AIDS crisis. He captured the era’s vibrancy, pleasures and hazards through images of his ex-boyfriends, street scenes and idiosyncratic menswear. Now, over 40 years…
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The ‘Lolita’ Story Nabokov Kept Hidden
Editor’s Note: On this date in 1958, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was published. Today, we return to our coverage of Sarah Weinman’s “The Real Lolita,” which looked at that book’s real-life inspiration. Sarah Weinman probably reads more than you do. According to tallies she has shared on Twitter (where she has more than 400,000 followers), she…
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Q & A: Why The Citizens Of A French Plateau Saved Hundreds During The Holocaust
The windswept plateau of Vivarais-Lignon in south-central France has a history of remarkable acts of sacrifice. For centuries, its residents have taken in refugees. In the 16th century, the largely Protestant plateau sheltered its coreligionists during religious wars. Two centuries later, the population hid Catholic priests during the French Revolution’s anti-clerical Reign of Terror. In…
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The Secret Jewish History Of Robert De Niro
Actor Robert De Niro, who turns 75 years old August 17, is perhaps best known for playing the roles of Italian gangsters and assorted crazies in his much lauded, 55-year career in film. An entire subgenre of his work, however, has been devoted to portraying Jewish characters: gangsters and otherwise. Far from being typecast in…
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