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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Finally, A TV Show Shows How Journalists Mistreat The Ex-Orthodox
Given that “High Maintenance,” the HBO series about weed dealers and their regular clients situations is set in New York, it was only a matter of time before the show featured characters from the Ultra-Orthodox community. “Derech,” which premiered in February, concerns a reporter’s romantic interest in an ex-Chasid, but two common patterns differentiate it…
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The Secret Jewish History Of The Chinese New Year
This year, the Chinese New Year falls on Friday, February 16, the day when revelers — by some estimates, fully one-sixth of the earth’s population — will usher in the Year of the Dog. The day is observed throughout China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore and some other Asian countries, as well as in Chinatowns around the…
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Breathtaking, Rare Yiddish Magazines Get New Life Online
A treasure trove of Yiddish avant-garde journals from the period between the two world wars is now online through a remarkable digitization project called Milgroym. The project presents originals, translations, and commentaries, and the visuals are breathtaking; treats for the online reader include a drawing for a Chassidic costume for a modernist ballet, circa 1923….
The Latest
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Of God, Dice And Fatal Car Accidents
It was the second time I noticed a news story about a fatal crash of a church group that I had the uneasy feeling there was a pattern. That time, it was Baptists, seniors in their church’s Young at Heart ministry, on their way to “three days of singing, laughing and preaching” at a Fall…
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Art How Avram Finkelstein Changed The Way We Think About AIDS — With One Pink Triangle
In the 1980’s the American Jewish artist and writer Avram Finkelstein was a co-creator of the iconic AIDS crisis protest poster which features a pink triangle with the words “Silence=Death.” How this influential graphic image was designed is recalled in Finkelstein’s new memoir, “After Silence: A History of AIDS Through Its Images” (University of California…
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David Grossman Announced As Winner Of 2018 Israel Prize In Literature
The Israeli author David Grossman is having quite the moment: Since winning the Man Booker International Prize for “A Horse Walks Into a Bar” in June, that novel has landed Grossman on The New York Times’s list of the 100 best books of 2017 and won him a National Jewish Book Award. As of this…
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Why Renia Spiegel Is Being Called ‘The Polish Anne Frank’
“Listen! Listen to me and understand. Some kind of fever took over the city. The vision of the ghetto, already forgotten by everybody, has returned. And it is even more dreadful than before, because it knocks on the doors of petrified hearts and it is ruthless, it doesn’t want to go away.” In May 1942,…
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What I Learned From Interviewing Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Superhero
Follow Ruth Bader Ginsburg onto a stage, and you will have an extraordinary experience. It’s not that she makes a grand entrance. Quite the contrary — her frame is so tiny, her gait is so slow, that she appears to want to slide meekly into a room rather than take it by storm. But then…
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Film & TV Alex Ross Perry’s Tale Of Quiet Desperation — And People Who Won’t Shut Up
“Some people would find it stifling or, you know, contained, but I love it. It’s thrilling, for my whole life to exist in one small zone,” Nick muses to Naomi, a visitor from out of town shortly into Alex Ross Perry’s “Golden Exits.” Like Nick, the film is nestled snugly into a well-defined portion of…
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How A Teenage ‘Shabbos Goy’ Stowed Away On America’s First Antarctic Exploration
Teenagers dream about running away. They always have; they likely always will; often, when they do, the results are decidedly weird. (See: Haight-Ashbury circa the 1960s.) But there’s packing a knapsack and setting out for the Summer of Love, and then there’s swimming across a major river intending to hitch a ride on a boat…
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Rachel Kadish Wins Association Of Jewish Libraries’ Inaugural Fiction Award
On Tuesday, the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) announced Rachel Kadish as the winner of its first-ever Jewish Fiction Award. Her novel, “The Weight of Ink,” was chosen from a list of 50 works of fiction with “significant Jewish thematic content,” according to an AJL blog post. Ruth Gilligan’s “Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan”…
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