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
Jeffrey Katzenberg Hits $1 Billion Benchmark For His Short-Form Streaming Platform
In a DVD extra for his 2006 film “Inland Empire” the director David Lynch said, “If you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film.” But Lynch’s exhortation hasn’t stopped ex-DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who’s betting big money that tablet and mobile viewing of cinema-quality content…
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Theater How Sholem Aleichem Became The Hottest Writer In New York
Who would’ve thought that the hottest tickets in town this summer of 2018 would be for two shows adapting the stories of the great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem? While both are well-executed and deserving of the mostly rave reviews they’ve received, neither is particularly innovative or cutting-edge from a theatrical standpoint. It would be a…
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Art How A New Mexico Jewish Couple May Have Pulled Off A $160 Million Art Heist
It appears that Jewish couple Rita and Jerry Alter walked away from a 1985 trip to an Arizona museum with quite the souvenir. After Rita’s death in 2017, the Alters’ home in New Mexico was found to contain a long-lost Willem de Kooning painting, worth $160 million, yet no evidence had previously linked them to…
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Bookseller And Library Archivist Charged With Stealing $8 Million Worth Of Books
What’s a bookstore owner to do when he’s strapped for cash? If he’s John Ezra Schulman, proprietor of Caliban Books in Oakland, Pennsylvania, he may — allegedly — pilfer rare books in excess of $8 million dollars from his local library. For almost two decades, Schulman got away with it. The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle reports…
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How Renée Taylor, Of ‘The Nanny’ Fame, Gets It Done
Attitudes towards the overweight in general, and women in particular, have evolved — well, sort of. Just ask actress and writer Renée Taylor (“The Nanny,” “Dream On,” “How I Met Your Mother”). As a keen social observer of the cultural scene, not to mention her own weight issues over the past 85 years, she knows…
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Film & TV Ruchie Freier’s Fight Exemplifies Orthodox Feminism. Is That A Good Thing?
Many people assume that the hardest part of being an Orthodox woman is following the religious code. But it’s not — it’s playing by the social rules. The new documentary “93Queen” follows Judge Ruchie Freier, a Haredi woman, through the founding of the first all-female Orthodox EMT group, Ezras Nashim, and Freier’s campaign for Civil…
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History of ‘Mission: Impossible’
Last weekend, the sixth installment of the “Mission: Impossible” film franchise, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” rocketed to the top of the box office. The movies track the travails of Impossible Missions Force (IMF) master spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) as he hangs from helicopters, brawls on narrow walkways and sprints through cobblestone alleys in a…
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Art Gerda Taro Was A Pioneering Woman Photojournalist — Now She’s A Google Doodle
The Jewish-German photojournalist Gerda Taro’s brief life was filled with firsts. She is widely considered to have been the first woman photographer assigned to the frontlines and, unfortunately, the first to die on assignment. Today would have marked her 108th birthday, and Google is celebrating her considerable legacy with a doodle on its homepage. Taro,…
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Books Israel Just Detained The Writer of the Ultimate Arab-Jewish Coming-Of-Age Novel
Israeli author Moriel Rothman-Zecher was detained and questioned at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv this week, before being released and told to think of the conversation as a “warning.” Rothman-Zecher, the 28-year-old author of the novel “Sadness is A White Bird,” was stopped by an official identifying as a member of Shin-Bet, the Israeli…
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In Anton Rubinstein’s ‘Demon,’ A Moving Examination Of Exile
The title character of Anton Rubinstein’s opera “Demon,” appearing at Bard SummerScape through August 5, is an anomaly. He’s not really interested in sowing evil. He doesn’t yearn for heaven; he always found it boring. He’s profoundly skeptical of the unquestioning worship of God. He doesn’t care for the idea of divine love, convinced only…
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Palestinian Writer Convicted Over Poems Sentenced To Five Months In Prison
After over two years of house arrest, Palestinian poet and Israeli citizen Dareen Tatour has finally learned what her future holds. On Tuesday, July 31 the Nazareth District Court sentenced Tatour, who in 2015 drew wide support from writers and advocates of free speech, to five months in prison, Haaretz reports. The sentencing follows Tatour’s…
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Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
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Fast Forward Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
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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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Culture She was my Hebrew school bully — and I finally learned what happened to her
In Case You Missed It
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Culture In this Holocaust story, there are few words, no swastikas, no yellow stars — just movement, passion and empathy
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Opinion What Democrats fighting Trump should learn from Germany’s failure to stop Hitler
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Fast Forward 31st anniversary of AMIA bombing marked by ceremonies in Argentina, Israel and, for the first time, Congress
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Fast Forward Mike Huckabee to Israel: End hostile treatment of Christian allies
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