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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Film & TV
Yes, Sci-Fi Has An Anti-Semitism Problem — But Not The One You Think
Science fiction universes ought to aspire to “Star Trek’s” charge to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” So why do so many works of sci-fi seem content to timidly remain with the same ugly stereotypes we have here on earth?…
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This Actor Tackles Jewish Stereotypes — By Performing Them
Superstitions are strange things that often produce even stranger talismans. In Poland, one common type of good-luck token comes in unsettling forms: Paintings, magnets and statues of Jewish people, dressed like Shalom Aleichem characters, counting out gold coins. It sounds like a throwback to a darker time, but, much like the mascot of the Cleveland…
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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…
The Latest
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How Jewish Rights Became Human Rights
Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century By James Loeffler Yale University Press, 384 pages, $32.50 Following Winston Churchill’s prediction in 1942 that the war against fascism would “end with the enthronement of human rights,” the phrase, which had rarely been used in the discourse of international law, began to gain currency….
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Film & TV A Most Unnatural Experiment With Nature And Nurture
“It’s a lot darker than a Disney movie,” Paula Bernstein says to a chirpy talk show host who has just compared the magical coincidences of her separated-at-birth story to a fantasy from the wonderful world of Uncle Walt. The host is gobsmacked by the facts that Paula and her identical twin sister Elyse Schein both…
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‘Maus’ Creator Art Spiegelman Becomes First Comics Artist To Win Prestigious Culture Award
(JTA) — Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novelist for “Maus,” is set to become the first cartoonist to win the prestigious MacDowell Medal for culture and the arts. The recognition puts Spiegelman, the son of Polish Holocaust survivors, in the company of cultural icons such as painter Georgia O’Keeffe and surrealist filmmaker David Lynch. “Maus,”…
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Alissa Quart On Crusading Jewishly For Social Justice
What happens when the bottom falls out of the middle class? That’s the wrenching, relevant question at the heart of “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,” Alissa Quart’s eloquent and passionate dispatch from what she deems the struggling “Middle Precariat.” In deeply etched portraits of struggling professionals, Quart evokes how soaring costs and hostile…
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Art Israeli Illusionist Uri Geller Finds A 19th-Century Soap Factory Where He’s Building His Museum
Sometimes when you build a museum, the past finds you. A few weeks ago Uri Geller, the Israeli illusionist who made his name in the 1970s by using his mind to bend spoons on television, sensed something beneath the debris at the building site of his forthcoming museum, the Uri Geller Museum in Jaffa, Haaretz…
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Nazi Symbols In Video Games? For First Time, Germany Says Yes.
Since a 1998 censorship ruling on video games, German gamers have played World War II-themed titles like “Call of Duty” without a swastika in sight. That may soon change. The Telegraph reports that the German video games industry body in charge of regulating content, the Entertainment Software Self-Regulation Body — known as the USK —…
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How Yiddish Education Got Its Start In America, From Zionism To Socialism
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Are Jews a people or a religious community? This reductive question has been debated for more than two centuries, since the time of the Jewish Enlightenment. Its stakes are particularly high with regard to Jewish education. Religious subjects have an old and fixed place in the Jewish…
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Music The Secret Jewish History Of Aretha Franklin
To understand the close ties between the singer Aretha Franklin, who has died at the age of 76, and Jewish musicians, writers, and performers, one need not have seen the 1982 TV special starring Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen) in which the comedian who famously got no respect feigns singing backup on Franklin’s 1967 recording…
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Music ‘No matter what, I will always be a Jew.’ Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history
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