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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A Case Of Blood Libel In Chicago
The accusation against Herris Kahn was a fleeting event in a far corner of Chicago. If not for the reporting in a foreign-language journal and a local newspaper, the story might be completely forgotten by now, a century later. Neither the Tribune nor any of the city’s other six dailies gave it even a sentence….
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7 Arrested After Anish Kapoor’s ‘Cloud Gate’ Found Vandalized
Seven people were arrested early Tuesday morning after graffiti was discovered on Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Police responding to a trespassing call arrived at the park shortly after midnight and found that the sculpture, known colloquially as “The Bean,” had been tagged with white spray paint CBS Chicago reported. The…
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Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sandman’ Gets Netflix Series Order
The miniseries adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s “Good Omens” made amusing headlines in June when a group of concerned Christians petitioned Netflix to cancel the show for portraying its main characters — an angel and a devil — as friends and depicting the Antichrist as a “normal kid.” There was only one problem:…
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‘The Seinfeld Chronicles’ Turns 30 — But Maybe We Should Wait To Celebrate
My mother recorded every episode of “Seinfeld” on VHS; she thought the show would never last and wanted to document its brief existence. 30 years ago, in July of 1989, her estimation appeared to be correct. Based on the performance of “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” the tepidly-received pilot of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s show about…
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How Immigrant Jews Learned that Marrying for Love Would Make Them American
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Baltimore’s Moses Montefiore Congregation was the site of a most unusual wedding on October 12, 1902. The festivities began in ordinary fashion as guests gathered to attend the nuptials of Marie Roypen and Samuel Oren, two young Jewish immigrants. However, the wedding quickly took a shocking turn….
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A White Supremacist Murderer Devastated Chicago 20 Years Ago. Why Didn’t Anything Change?
Just before sunset on July 2, 1999, a Ford Crown Vic approached 15-year-old Ephraim Wolfe in Chicago’s West Rogers Park. A bullet had just torn a dime-sized hole in Wolfe’s leg, a couple of inches below the knee. The friend with whom he’d been walking had run to a nearby house for help, and Wolfe…
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In ‘The Other Story’ Faith And Family Collide
When children leave the insular world of the Ultra-Orthodox, many parents sit shiva for them. Some choose to not even speak the child’s name once they’ve left the fold. When children leave the secular sphere of their parents, the shock to the system is often no less pronounced and may be more punctuated with denial…
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Books The Dangers Of Female Pleasure – And Rage. A Q&A With Jennifer Weiner
Jennifer Weiner, best-selling novelist, has been known to be outspoken about inequalities in publishing and in the consideration of women’s work. This is what Weiner told me she wants her obituary to read when we caught up last week. And unlike the obit your favorite male novelist is probably composing for himself, Weiner’s is 100%…
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We Failed To Save Refugees From the Holocaust. We’re Failing Again Today.
In “Americans and the Holocaust,” a special exhibition now on display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there is a memorable depiction of the obstacles that confronted Jews desperate to flee Europe as the Nazis marched across the Continent. The waiting list for a life-saving visa to the United States is illustrated by…
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Books Publisher Drops ‘How They Rule The World’ Book After Being Told It Had Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories
(JTA) — A major British publisher ceased producing copies of a Spanish author book, which critics said contains anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Penguin Random House UK on Thursday announced it would no longer print and ship Pedro Baños’ “How They Rule the World: The 22 Secret Strategies of Global Power,” which was published in English in…
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Happy 93rd Birthday, Mel Brooks!
At 93, Mel Brooks is a lot of things: A Kennedy Center award recipient, a titan of both stage and screen even a vampire grandfather in t “Hotel Transylvania 3,” but for all these distinctions he reduces himself to one thing. “I’m just a Jew comic,” he told David Denby in a profile published in…
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