Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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The Global Economic Crisis — Seen In The Outstretched Hands of Berlin’s Poor
I park my bicycle in front of the organic grocery store and lock it among the others. I’m proud of my bike, a Gudereit Fantasy Classic, which together with the lock and child seat cost around eight hundred euros or close to a thousand dollars. Among the other bikes stationed there it is nothing special….
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Does Ionesco’s ‘Rhinoceros’ Lose Something in Yiddish Translation?
New Yiddish Rep’s (NYR) 2013 production of “Waiting For Godot,” staged to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s great existential comedy, was ground-breaking. Its Yiddish speaking characters cast a new, more profound light on the masterpiece. Indeed, they evoked Holocaust survivors wandering across a post-apocalyptic landscape, especially as they talked about the ashes and…
The Latest
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New Digital Platform To Bring Jewish Family History To Life
Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History has launched an interactive digital platform for Jewish families to explore their heritage. Called “Re:collection,” it invites Jews to upload and curate media that helps to tell the stories of themselves and their ancestors, exchanging familial narratives with other participants. It was created by the museum in collaboration…
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Film & TV How Frederick Wiseman Shot The Great American Novel
They may never get around to writing the Great American Novel, but in the meantime if people need to get a sense of what it’s like to live in this country, they could do a lot worse than to have a close reading of the films of Frederick Wiseman. Since the late 1960s, the indefatigable…
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Paul Auster Snags Spot On Man Booker Prize Shortlist
Paul Auster’s novel “4 3 2 1” has earned a spot on the 2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist. It is one of six novels named to be a finalist for the prestigious literary prize. Also on the shortlist are Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West,” Fiona Mozley’s “Elmet,” George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Ali Smith’s “Autumn,”…
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Rod Blagojevich Is Reading Viktor Frankl In Prison, Still Not A Martyr
Lest you have forgotten, a reminder: Rod Blagojevich, former Illinois governor, was impeached and removed from office, and separately convicted on 18 federal corruption charges — 5 of which have since been vacated — for, among other wrongs, trying to sell the former Senate seat of Barack Obama after his election to the presidency. Blagojevich…
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Music How 9/11 Changed Pink Floyd And Roger Waters For Me
I went to see Roger Waters, late of Pink Floyd, play a Brooklyn arena last night. It was September 11, a fact that seemed irrelevant when I bought the tickets. Once you get over the embarrassment of watching a 70-year-old man get worked up over lyrics he wrote when he was thirty (what if they…
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Composer Michael Friedman Was Inspired By His Jewish Origins
Philadelphia-born Michael Friedman, who died on September 9 at age 41 from complications related to HIV/AIDS, was more than just the composer of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” Before “Hamilton,” and with a decidedly more ambiguous and less hero-worshiping optic than that mega-hit, “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” bowed on Broadway in 2010, highlighting a president who…
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Books In Praise of Giving Offense: A Review Of Eli Valley’s Diaspora Boy
There’s a concept in the early Zionist writings that still haunts contemporary Jewish life. It’s the belief that the Diaspora Jew is an outmoded kind of Jew. Weak and effeminate from too much studying, he is submissive and abject, always apologizing to the gentiles who hate him. As opposed to this Diaspora Jew, the early…
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Why Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ Still Matters So Much To Me — And All Of Us
Words tend to fail us most in two circumstances — in the face of profound evil and of transcendent decency. When Elie Wiesel first tried to describe his experience in the camps, he later wrote, “I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle.” We who have the honor to speak about Elie have the opposite…
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Israeli Photographer Ofir Barak Discusses His Work On Mea Shearim
Perhaps it’s counterintuitive, but there is something about the Haredi community of Mea Shearim — an ultra orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem known for its insularity and religious zeal — that makes it an absolutely fascinating artistic subject. Of course, one might think, quite rightly, that an insular community that enforces (sometimes violently) norms of modesty, patriarchy,…
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