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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‘Oslo Diaries’ Tells Tragic Story Of What Might Have Been
“The Oslo Diaries,” an HBO documentary that will debut on September 13, is a heartbreaking retelling of the events surrounding the making and breaking of the Oslo Accords. The documentary, which reflects on the Accords for the 25th anniversary of the signing of the initial agreement, makes effective use of archival footage, material from previously…
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The Forward’s Past Events
From writer-at-large Jane Eisner discussing Israel with Peter Beinart to life editor Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt discussing the first Orthodox women’s ambulance with Ruchie Freier, and from Yiddish editor Rukhl Schaechter talking about women in Yiddish to executive editor Dan Friedman explaining the secret Jewish history of whisky in a sukkah, the Forward hosts a variety of…
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The Deaths Of Others: Why 9/11’s Great Novel Still Hasn’t Been Written
On September 19, 2001, an obscure Chicago politician was afforded three hundred words in the Hyde Park Herald to react to the September 11 attacks. “Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families,” he wrote, “I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of…
The Latest
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Trust #PlaidShirtGuy To End Trump’s Nightmare Reign
I was wondering if I was reading too much into the near-convergence of Sen. John McCain’s funeral; Labor Day, the traditional kickoff of the campaign season; and Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish holidays of repentance and renewal. But when I saw that Steve Bannon called the National Cathedral service “the High Holy Days”…
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Gary Shteyngart Takes On The Trump Era (Again)
Gary Shteyngart was writing about Trump all along, and we didn’t know it. Consider the contents of his novels: Russian oligarchs undermining foreign governments for obscure reasons; the rotund failsons of the mega-rich, their gross bodies engorged on unimaginable luxury; the blurring borders between politics and multi-level marketing; and, despite ever-increasing inequality and the threat…
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Dorothy Parker’s Childhood Home To Be Demolished
Even Dorothy Parker, the queen of witty ripostes, might have had a hard time making light of this fresh hell. The West Side Rag reports that Parker’s childhood home on 72nd Street near Broadway will be demolished to make room for a 21-story retail and residential development. Parker, who would have turned 125 on August…
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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…
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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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