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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Anish Kapoor Does His Part For Refugees While Another Artist Sets A Trap For Him
After Anish Kapoor was awarded the 2017 Genesis Prize, he pledged to donate the $1 million that accompany the award to causes aiding refugees. But the sculptor, most famous for his Chicago work “Cloud Gate,” colloquially known as “The Bean,” is also planning to make a difference with his art. A new drawing by Kapoor…
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Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Four: Natalia Ginzburg
There it was, in Natalia Ginzburg’s obituary in The New York Times: A quick description, not even a full sentence, of the trouble of being a woman writer. It was 1991, and Ginzburg, born to a Jewish father and Catholic mother in Palermo, Sicily, in 1916, was seen as one of the great Italian authors…
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Rodgers And Hammerstein Are Making A Bundle With Ariana Grande’s ‘7 Rings’
There may be no hit more ubiquitous for the musical team of Rodgers and Hammerstein than “My Favorite Things.” Despite being written by two Jews and sung, in its original context, by an ex-nun to her charges during a thunderstorm in an Austrian summer estate, the tune from “The Sound of Music” developed an unshakable…
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Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Three: Fran Ross
Fran Ross was black and Jewish, and she wanted you to know just how difficult that identity could be to manage. In her only novel, “Oreo” (1974), the Jewish Samuel Schwartz and black Helen (Honeychile) Clark make a match, an attachment that provokes outrageous reactions in both their parents. “When Honeychile had broken the news…
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Why We Don’t Talk About Jewish Poverty — And Why We Should
In 1972, the journalist Paul Cowan spent weeks roaming Manhattan’s Lower East Side on assignment for The Village Voice, searching for the Jewish poor. He didn’t have to look far. “Most people think of the Jewish immigration as the most spectacularly successful one in American history,” Cowan wrote, “but the 50-year journey from the shtetl…
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In A First, A Major Museum Turns Down A Gift From The Sackler Family
In a landmark move, London’s National Portrait Gallery has decided not to take money from the Sackler family — at least for now. The gallery and the Sackler Trust jointly announced Tuesday that a £1 million gift the Sacklers awarded the museum in 2016 for the development of the museum’s £35.5m “Inspiring People” project would…
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Books New Book ‘Kushner, Inc’ Makes Wild Claims — But The Wildest Thing Is Reading About Javanka At All
A new book, “Kushner, Inc” by journalist Vicky Ward, calls itself “the first explosive book about Javanka and their infamous rise to power.” The gleaming hardcover, bearing the words “Greed. Ambition. Corruption.” promises to “dig [sic] beneath the myth the couple has created.” This is a case of beautifully coiffed snake eats tail — digging…
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Film & TV Behold Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Bold Thoughts On #MeToo And Roman Polanski
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a man of ideas. A celebrity philosopher of the kind that has no equivalent this side of the Atlantic, he’s nonetheless picked the United States as the subject of his latest book, “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World,” in which he lays out how…
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Does The Book Of Esther Have The Longest Word In The Hebrew Bible?
For word nerds, the Book of Esther contains a special treat — the longest word in the Tanakh. Technically, v’ha’achshadrapanim and its eleven letters makes it the length champion of the entire Hebrew Bible. It means “and the satraps” or “and the governors of the provinces of the Persian Empire,” and it comes near the…
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Anish Kapoor Understands Why Young Muslims Might Join ISIS
Anish Kapoor is used to having ugliness added to his work. In 2018, Kapoor, the artist responsible for “Sky Mirror” and “Ark Nova,” sued the National Rifle Association for using his sculpture “Cloud Gate” in an advertisement accused of stoking fear and division. But while he succeeded in getting the NRA to remove the unauthorized…
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Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Two: Nadezhda Mandelstam
When it came to Nadezhda Mandelstam, the scholar Clarence Brown might have put it best: She was a “vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.” Or perhaps it was the poet Seamus Heaney, who wrote of Mandelstam’s transformation into a…
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