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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Watch A Clip From A New Animated Film On Oliver Sacks
Famed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks is getting the cartoon treatment. On August 28, 2018, Dempsey Rice, the director of “The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks” posted a short clip of the feature-length film to her YouTube page. Over the course of a decade, Rice, a photographer and documentarian, conducted extensive interviews with Sacks, the…
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Behold The Oldest Known Yiddish Writing In The World
A medieval Jewish manuscript bearing the oldest known example of the Yiddish language is making a rare public appearance at Israel’s National Library in Jerusalem ahead of the High Holidays. The Worms Mahzor, named for the German city where it was housed for centuries, is a richly illuminated codex from the 13th century containing the…
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A Jewish Novel From Finland — And Other Treasures Funded By The NEA
In exciting news for readers of global Jewish literature, the National Endowment of the Arts announced translation grants for a Yiddish translator, a Hebrew translator, a Finnish translator translating a Finnish Jewish comic novelist, and a translator of a Swiss-Jewish writer. The highly coveted grants are among the most prestigious available to translators and are…
The Latest
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6 Surprising Ways To Use A Shofar
Being little more than a husk of keratin hacked off the head of a ram, the shofar is not a very versatile instrument. Because there’s no real mechanism to alter pitch within the hollow horn, the burden is on the blower, who can modulate tones using his or her lips, teeth or tip-of-the tongue. For…
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Serial Season 3 Will Follow Cases In Cleveland Criminal Court
Serial” first gripped listeners in 2014 (and Kim Kardashian as recently as last month) with the case of Adnan Syed, a young man convicted of murdering his high school girlfriend. The podcast’s second season, which had more mixed reviews, centered on Bowe Bergdahl, an army sergeant kidnapped by the Taliban. Now, the hit show has…
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Film & TV Meet David Fantle, Interviewer To The Golden Age Stars
40 years ago David Fantle and his writing partner, Tom Johnson, saved up enough money from their summer jobs to fly to Los Angeles for interviews with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. They were 18-years-old Minnesotans with no credentials other than chutzpah and a love for Golden Age cinema. They had never done anything like…
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Young Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear’ — How Would He Influence History?
Little did I suspect that Bob Woodward, my closest college friend, would bring down a president and become what many people have called “the greatest investigative reporter of all time.” I think of him often, especially now with “Fear,” his book about the Trump White House, which is being published on September 11. I first…
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From 1898 — Why Plagues And Fires Make A Good New Year
Rosh Hashanah! Thousands of poor, addled, hapless but sincerely devoted Jews stand and plead with the Master of the Universe for a good year. Surrounded by all manner of hypocrites who petition, weep and exhort alongside them — folks who strive to cut a ‘“deal” with their God. They point out how three days a…
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Music For Paul Simon On His Retirement — Wisdom From My Grandpa Joe
My grandfather had a surprise for me. Seven years after buying his 1971 Buick LeSabre, he’d finally decided to get with the times and install an eight-track cassette player under the car’s dashboard. This in itself was not surprising, as he was a talented amateur pianist and violinist who genuinely loved music, even if his…
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NBC Orders “Law & Order: Hate Crimes”
For all its successes, there are a couple “Law & Order” variations that have died on the vine. Who could forget — or rather, who can remember — the single season clunkers “Law & Order: LA” and “Law & Order: Trial By Jury?” Now, Variety reports, a new riff on the old procedural formula is…
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How I Grew Up With ‘Fiddler On The Roof’
“They’re doing ‘Fiddler’ in Yiddish,” a friend recently told my husband and me. “You both speak it, right?” “Only what I picked up from my parents,” I said. “Household Yiddish,” Martin joked. “We know the words for complaining.” “There are subtitles,” she said, offering to get tickets for us to join her and her husband….
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