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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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 —…
The Latest
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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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This Was The End Of Francois Truffaut’s Innocence
Even if he hadn’t started his career with “The 400 Blows,” one of cinema’s defining studies of childhood, Francois Truffaut would have a reputation as a particularly youthful filmmaker. His style is marked by its verve, as summed up by the director’s maxim, “four ideas for every one minute,” and the particular livewire energy of…
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Jewish Montreal Is More Than Just Leonard Cohen And Bagels
Leonard Cohen. Mordecai Richler. Bagels. To the outside world, Jewish Montreal’s achievements often get reduced to sound bites and caricatures. But as a new exhibition at downtown Montreal’s McCord Museum makes clear, Jews have had a hand in nearly every aspect of civic, social, cultural and business life in Canada’s second-largest city. Even the organizers…
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Britain Just Returned Iraqi Artifacts. What Does That Mean For The Jewish Archive?
The eight artifacts were found in London in 2003, the same year in which Iraq’s National Museum was looted in the wake of the American invasion. Between 2,000 and 5,000 years old, the sacred objects — which include clay cones inscribed with cuneiform script, a shard of a ceremonial weapon and a marble pendant —…
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Another Hidden Jewish Girl — But Not Anne Frank
The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found By Bart van Es Penguin Press, 304 pages, $28 It’s impossible to think of the Holocaust in the Netherlands without conjuring the ghost of Anne Frank. And though Frank and her diary were exceptional, her story embodies the opposing fates of Dutch…
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No, That New ‘Anne Frank’ Production Doesn’t Cast Nazis As ICE. But It’s Still Provocative.
The story of Anne Frank humanizes a period of history defined by horrors that can often feel beyond the scope of our comprehension. Since 1955, the stage adaptation of Frank’s writings by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett has brought her story to life, serving as an object lesson in what it is to be human…
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Art Mandrakes, Dragons, Jews — And Other Monsters Of Medieval Times
The mandrake is a small, perennial plant that grows in warm Mediterranean climates. Its flowers are a pretty shade of purple, but its roots can be deadly. Pluck a mandrake from the soil and you’ll find a tiny man hanging down underneath the leaves, screaming loudly enough to kill anyone nearby. The only safe way…
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