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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Historian Simon Schama Is Now A Knight
That’s Sir Simon Schama to you. On February 5 Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, knighted Schama, the 73-year-old historian and Columbia University professor, for his contribution to history, the Western Telegraph reports. Schama is the author of books on the history of art, France, England, the Netherlands and the American Revolutionary War. In 2013…
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Henry Ford Was Anti-Semitic. Bill McGraw Wrote About It — And Got Fired.
When Bill McGraw became the editor of the Dearborn Historian last summer, he hoped to grow the audience of the city-funded Michigan journal, which has 230 subscribers and no website. He was not expecting to make national news. But when Dearborn mayor John B. O’Reilly first objected to the cover of the journal’s January issue…
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Karl Marx’s London Tomb Damaged In A Suspected Hammer Attack
Even in death Karl Marx can’t rest easy. The Father of Communism’s life was disrupted by exile and expulsion as his profile and radical ideas spread throughout Europe. He finally made a home for himself in London where he wrote “Das Kapital,” helped found the German Workers’ Educational Society and died of pleurisy in 1883….
The Latest
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J.D. Salinger’s Son Is Readying His Father’s Secret Work For Publication — But It Could Take A While
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Matt Salinger’s father — yes, J.D. Salinger, the celebrated author of “Franny and Zooey” and “The Catcher in the Rye” — largely retired from public life and grew estranged from the literary word. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the author chose his next of kin over editors,…
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Cory Booker Is Running For President. Marshall Curry Is Filming It — But First, He Might Win An Oscar.
On February 20, 1939, 20,000 Americans met at Madison Square Garden. They pledged their undivided allegiance to the United States, stood for the National Anthem and, before the remarks of the keynote speaker (Fritz Julius Kuhn, the leader of the German American Bund), they held their arms out in a Nazi salute. These everyday men…
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Through February 28: Manhattan: Exhibit Celebrating Workers And Musicians
Composer Julia Wolfe’s new work “Fire In My Mouth” may have already premiered, but it’s not too late to visit its complementary archival exhibit, “Immigrant New York: Celebrating the Workers and Musicians of Our City.” “Fire In My Mouth,” a multimedia exploration of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, was performed late last month at…
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A Jewish Girl’s Guide To Getting Dumped By A Doctor
I can’t explain the basic science behind electricity or eyeglasses. I’m not sure if a bull is better than a bear, I have no real understanding of the Constitution, and I don’t think I remember how to do long division. Plus, most of the time, my hair looks bad. And yet, I am dating a…
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At Museum of Jewish Heritage, Plans For The Largest Exhibit Ever About Auschwitz
Dachau. Treblinka. Chelmno. These words are startling in their power to recall the darkest period in Jewish history. But Auschwitz is different. Auschwitz produced Dr. Mengele and Rudolf Höss, two of the most infamous figures of the Shoah. Auschwitz was where thousands of everyday Germans worked alongside war criminals. At Auschwitz the Nazis established the…
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Yaron Ezrahi: How Music Helped an Optimist Refrain from Pessimism
A leitmotif of music as social inspiration ran through the life of the Israeli political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, who died on January 29 at age 78. Author of “Imagined Democracies,” “The Descent of Icarus,” and “Rubber Bullets,” Ezrahi also coedited a collection of essays, “Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism,” while personally eschewing any such pessimism. In…
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Theater We Regret To Inform You That David Mamet’s Harvey Weinstein Play Will Go On With John Malkovich
Pulitzer-winning playwright, director and filmmaker David Mamet is very good at a few things. He reinvented the American theater with his roughneck, elliptical and profanity-laden dialogue. He founded the Atlantic Theater Company with William H. Macy and wrote several controversial but influential books on acting and directing. As a political agitator he stirs the pot…
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80 Years Ago Today, Hitler Threatened Genocide Of European Jews — Was Anybody Listening?
January 30, 1939. Adolf Hitler had been chancellor of Germany for exactly six years. Thousands of Jews were already imprisoned in concentration camps. Legally defined as anyone possessing at least one Jewish grandparent, Jews were prohibited from marrying so-called Aryans, and had their businesses destroyed. But his annual speech to the Reichstag, Germany’s legislative body,…
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