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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Resurrecting Yiddish Music One Song At A Time
Sometime in late 1944, Taybl Birman, a 28-year-old Soviet Jew working in a tailor shop in war-torn Minsk, composed a song for her husband, Misha, a Red Army soldier who was fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front. The song began playfully — with Taybl mentioning that she was sitting “beside my beloved sewing machine,”…
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Trump Tossed Starburst At Angela Merkel In A Fit Of Pique
Just when you thought the news in the age of Trump couldn’t get any crazier, a report has surfaced that the president used his favorite candy to make a point to German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the contentious G7 summit meeting. Trump reportedly slammed two pieces of Starburst candy on the table after the German…
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Remembering Charles Krauthammer — Guardian Of Memory
Despite his status as influential political pundit, Charles Krauthammer, who died on June 21 at age 68, knew that no spirit should be nurtured on politics alone. Krauthammer’s rich and varied intellectual and esthetic diet was described in his “Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics” (2013) Some of his passions and…
The Latest
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The Food Truth Is Too Inconvenient
The Forward’s executive editor Dan Friedman is not convinced by Natalie Portman’s and Jonathan Safran Foer’s new film critiquing factory farming, “Eating Animals” — a film I and my team at Farm Forward contributed hundreds of hours over five years to help make possible. While acknowledging the importance of the topic, Friedman calls the film…
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Is There Such A Thing As Evil — And Is Trump It?
Is Donald J. Trump a liar? Yes, at this point it seems safe to say that he regularly tells intentional untruths. So, is Donald Trump evil? The idea of evil makes me uncomfortable. It makes a tribal, politically-loaded and socially-constructed category into a universal one. It demonizes difference. It treats psychopathology theologically. And, if we…
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My Grandmother’s Harrowing Journey From Nazi Germany To America
She crossed so many borders I started to lose track: Poland into Germany via cattle car; Germany into Czechoslovakia on foot; Czechoslovakia into Germany when she and her parents fell asleep in a (supposedly) broken-down train car that inched back into service while they slept; Germany into Canada on a steamer, loaded down with a…
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‘INFEST’ — The Ugly Nazi History of Trump’s Chosen Verb About Immigrants
When President Trump characterized immigrants as “animals,” some people waved it away, claiming he was only referring to gang members. But his use of “infest” in connection to human beings is impossible to ignore. The president’s tweet that immigrants will “infest our Country” includes an alarming verb choice for anyone with knowledge of history. Characterizing…
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For #MeToo To Work We Have To Move Beyond 90s ‘Bitchification’
Award-winning journalist Allison Yarrow is a former deputy digital editor at the Forward and a National Magazine Award finalist who has also written for, among others, The New York Times, the Washington Post and Vox. She was a TED resident and author of an ebook about the sex abuse trial in Brooklyn of ultra-Orthodox counselor…
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For These Doomed Passengers, There Was No Refuge in Cuba
The German Girl By Armando Lucas Correa, translated by Nick Caistor Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $26.99 The drama of the St. Louis, the ship that once promised last-minute rescue for hundreds of German Jewish refugees, is compelling enough without fictional embellishment. In 1939, the trans-Atlantic liner voyaged from Hamburg, Germany, to an abruptly…
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Film & TV Jeff Goldblum, A Flirt And A Half, Is A Philip Roth Fan
A confession: I, due to an unexplained resistance to seeing the “Jurassic Park” movies, was until this year unaware of the existence of Jeff Goldblum. This was a mistake. Jeff Goldblum, I have learned, is the closest thing Hollywood has to a human sunbeam — see “Thor: Ragnarok,” in which he plays a dictator with…
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The Secret Jewish History Of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Beloved Infidel’
Sheilah Graham, longtime Hollywood gossip columnist and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lover and muse, was delighted to share her personal history, especially its romantic highlights. She wrote no fewer than 10 tell-alls. But while Graham earned her living by exposing the secrets and foibles of others, one fact you won’t find in her autobiographical work is…
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