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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The Night We Lost The Messiah Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson
The balcony curtains suddenly parted. The Rebbe sat motionless surrounded by his three trusted rabbinical aides. On cue, the singing and chanting began: “Long live our Master, Teacher and Rebbe, King Messiah, Forever and Ever!” Hundreds of men dressed in black suits stood shoulder to shoulder on the synagogue floor craning their necks towards the…
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WATCH: How The Jews Of The Vilna Ghetto Saved Precious Books From Nazis
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A group of several dozen Jewish intellectuals known as the Paper Brigade risked their lives to save thousands of books and documents from destruction during the Holocaust by hiding them in the Vilna ghetto. The Yiddish Forward spoke with Dr. David Fishman, author of the recent book…
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Seymour Hersh’s Rise From Dry Cleaner To America’s Supersnoop
Reporter: A Memoir By Seymour M. Hersh Knopf, 352 pp, $27.95 The exploits of Lowell Bergman, Carl Bernstein, David Corn, Michael Isikoff, Lucy Komisar, Sydney Schanberg, and I.F. Stone might lead one to conclude that investigative journalism is as Jewish a profession as stand-up comedy and matzoh baking. Dubbed “a national treasure” by David Halberstam,…
The Latest
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In ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock,’ Jewish And Other Mysteries
“I know when there’s girls together there is trouble,” says Reg Lumley, a side character in the new Amazon miniseries “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” The series is based loosely on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, and was also adapted by Peter Weir in his landmark 1975 film. The six-part television interpretation depicts girls and women living…
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Meet 3 Men On The Front Lines Of The Immigration Crisis
On a typical weekday, Rabbi Jonathan Klein can often be found marching alongside ministers, monsignors and janitors. Irv Hershenbaum could be pressuring multimillion-dollar almond growers to provide their workers with shade to protect them from the blazing California sun. And “Rabbi Dr.” Aryeh Cohen might well be phoning his Talmud students to let them know…
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My Father’s Day Regrets
The fellow who came up with the idea of Father’s Day was probably some poor haberdasher hoping to prompt children to buy ties and shirts, if you want to be cynical about it, but also, one hopes, wanting to allow those children to express their appreciation for their Dads. For many of us, however, particularly…
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June 10: Chicago: The Greater Chicago Jewish Festival
Become immersed in a day of Jewish culture at the Greater Chicago Jewish Festival on Sunday, June 10. From 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the St. Paul Woods, Cook County Forest Preserve, there will be live music (on four stages, featuring the likes of Corky Siegel, Howard Levy and RebbeSoul), comedy (think improv with…
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Philip Roth And The Yiddish Tradition
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the course of their ongoing debate, the literary critic Irving Howe used to complain that Philip Roth’s writing suffered from a weak connection to the Jewish tradition and that he was a writer with a “thin personal culture.” What strikes us more than 40 years later,…
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What The Ayatollah Means By ‘Eradicating’ Israel
Let me begin by thanking Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei of Iran and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly for the opportunity to investigate the word “eradicate.” I never thought I’d have the chance to express gratitude to Khamenei and Goldberg in the same sentence, but these are strange times. When the President of the United…
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Bruce Lee Was Jewish?
Was Bruce Lee really Jewish? The new Bruce Lee biography, “Bruce Lee: A Life”, comes with a few surprising revelations. Written by Matthew Polly and published on June 5, 2018 by Simon & Schuster “Bruce Lee: A Life” is the monumental new biography of the martial arts film star and cultural icon. Brice Lee was…
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Ilana Kurshan Wins Sami Rohr Prize For ‘If All The Seas Were Ink’
Ilana Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir” has won the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. “If All the Seas Were Ink” recounts the years in which Kurshan, recovering from the dissolution of her first marriage at age 27, undertook the project of reading the entire Talmud, one page per day….
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