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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Holocaust Survivor’s Piano Teaches A Lesson In Shared Humanity
When Shlomo Margaliot was 15 years old, his mother sewed a stack of Reichsmarks into his shirt and sent him on the most important errand of his young life: He was to purchase four tickets for a ship to Palestine, where the family planned to escape from Nazi Germany. But when Margaliot reached the ticket…
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Why My Polish High School Teaches Yiddish
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Few people know that there’s a high school in Warsaw that teaches Yiddish. In fact, it’s probably the only one in all of Europe that does. I know because I recently graduated from there and I was one of its Yiddish students. This isn’t a Jewish school….
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Hildebrand Gurlitt’s Art Hoard, Possibly Ill-Gotten During WWII, Makes Public Debut
This past week, over 400 works from the collection of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a German art dealer who traded in “degenerate art” on behalf of the Nazi government, went on display at Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern as well as the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany. Gurlitt’s 1,400 work collection, discovered in 2012, has been the subject of steady…
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Books Forverts Editorial: What’s Our Agenda?
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As editor of the Forverts, most of the questions I get from readers involve either the price of an obituary or a request to decipher a handwritten postcard written by a deceased relative. Recently, though, I got an email with a very different sort of question: “I’d…
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Does A Jewish Museum Fashion Exhibit Shortchange Jewish Culture?
A new exhibit at Manhattan’s Jewish Museum, “Veiled Meanings,” opens on a striking note, showcasing three different veiled women’s garments that many Americans would not, on first look, associate with Jews, including the Afghani chadur. The exhibit, a brief chronicle of garments common in Jewish communities of the past, has the potential to be a…
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Music LISTEN: Arik Einstein’s Yiddish Song “Meydele”
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Arik Einstein was the single most important figure in the rise of Israeli rock-music, as important to Israelis as Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and the Beatles were to Americans. Although known exclusively for his songs in Hebrew, Einstein did record one song in Yiddish in 1971, a…
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One Year After Leonard Cohen’s Death, Canada’s Greatest Musicians Paid Tribute
Sting rasped an elegant, effortless “Dance Me to the End of Love.” k.d. lang belted a to-the-rafters “Hallelujah.” Courtney Love bellowed a grunge-karaoke “Everybody Knows.” And the great man himself, via a video projected on giant screens, croaked “You Want It Darker” accompanied live by the choir of the Québec synagogue Shaar Hashomayim, which had…
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Should Harvey Weinstein Make Us Rethink Roman Polanski? The French Say ‘Non!’
Last Monday evening, two very different groups gathered at Paris’ famed Cinémathèque française. While smartly dressed film directors and actors quickly filed through the front doors, dozens of warmly dressed protestors — along with two largely undressed members of the militant feminist group Femen — milled outside. Many carried signs that riffed on the message,…
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Howard Jacobson, Simon Schama Condemn Labour Party’s Failure To Address Anti-Semitism
Three of the United Kingdom’s most prominent Jewish authors stepped forward yesterday to condemn anti-Semitism in one of the country’s leading political parties. In a Letter to the Editor published in The Times, Simon Schama, Howard Jacobson and Simon Sebag Montefiore criticized the Labour Party, led since 2015 by Jeremy Corbyn, for failing to check…
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EXCLUSIVE: That Time Adolf Hitler Had A Jewish Neighbor
The English Jewish historian Edgar Joseph Feuchtwanger was born in Munich in 1924. In 1929, Adolf Hitler moved into an apartment on Grillparzerstrasse across the street from Feuchtwanger’s family. “Hitler, My Neighbor: Memories of a Jewish Childhood, 1929-1939” recounts how as a youngster, Feuchtwanger witnessed the rise of Hitler. Feuchtwanger’s previous, much-respected books are about…
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Q & A: David Lang, Bang On A Can Co-Founder, Bargains With God
You have suffered a loss. You are grateful to God. You rage, you plead, you express your love. You are a sinner, a mourner, a citizen, alive. There is a psalm for most every experience in the handbook of humanity. And through a monumental program currently running at Lincoln Center, “The Psalms Experience,” audiences can…
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