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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Remembering Cynthia Heimel, Who Wrote Frankly On Sex And Womanhood
Cynthia Heimel, who frankly commented on sex, dating and the absurdities of New York City life in publications including New York Magazine, Vogue and Playboy, passed away on February 25 at age 70. In addition to her columns, Heimel wrote seven books, among them the cult classic “Sex Tips For Girls.” The Washington Post reports…
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Q & A: In ‘Back Talk,’ Danielle Lazarin Excavates Women’s Unspoken Feelings
The title story in Danielle Lazarin’s new collection, “Back Talk,” subtly articulates why young women choose to stay silent about difficult experiences. A rumor spreads about the main character’s sexual activity, and her classmates quickly condemn her without asking for her side of the story. Lazarin writes, “it’s easy to believe what you hear when…
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How Vashti Said No — And Faced The Consequences
Every time a scandal erupts around the sexual behavior of a powerful man, someone seems to ask, “Well, why didn’t she say no?” It so happens that the Book of Esther begins with the story of a woman who “says no,” and it demonstrates that the consequences of “saying no” can be severe: Queen Vashti…
The Latest
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What Do The Paintings ‘Jacob And His Twelve Sons,’ Once A Political Weapon In England, Mean Today?
If you’d like to see the face of the biblical patriarch Jacob, or that of any one of his twelve sons, you must take a big step back to do so. The individual portraits arranged around one long, large room at the Frick Collection demand it. Nearly seven feet tall and hung roughly a yard…
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What It Means To Grow Up Jewish in Chicago
Growing up Jewish in Chicago means you’re perversely proud of the fact that you didn’t grow up in New York. Growing up Jewish in Chicago means you actually grew up in Chicago — not in Skokie, Evanston, Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove or any of the other suburbs where Jews started to flee when real estate…
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André Aciman Confronts Exile And Desire
When André Aciman was 14 years old, his family was expelled from Egypt. He has returned only once, 30 years after his departure, he told me in January over coffee on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I realized that I’ve always hated Egypt, I never liked it,” he said. Still, the experience of living in and…
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Film & TV The Hollywood Directors Who Filmed Concentration Camp Liberations
Three iconic Hollywood directors — John Ford, George Stevens, and Samuel Fuller — may have created their most important work for the U.S. Armed Forces and Secret Services during World War II. As a new temporary exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH) reveals, the filmmakers documented conditions in newly liberated Nazi…
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Gothamist’s 4 Best Jewish Articles — From Mitzvah Tanks To Gefilte Fish
This morning, those of us who pine for quality local journalism woke up to a startling sight: Actual good news. A consortium of local radio stations, including New York’s WNYC, Washington D.C.’s WAMU and Southern California’s KPCC announced they had banded together to revive beloved local news organizations Gothamist and DNAInfo. As Wired reports, Billionaire…
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David Mamet, Doing The Seemingly Inevitable, Has Written A Play About Harvey Weinstein
LOS ANGELES, Feb 23 (Reuters) – David Mamet has written a new play about film producer Harvey Weinstein, the Pulitzer Prize winner said in an interview published on Friday. Timing for production of the play, currently titled “Bitter Wheat,” is still to be determined, the report said. “I was talking with my Broadway producer and…
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Film & TV In ‘The Young Karl Marx’ Raoul Peck Found The Man Behind The Myth. He Told Us How.
Raoul Peck’s latest film, “The Young Karl Marx”, is above all a story of clashing ideas. The film follows adversaries-turned-best-buds Marx and Friedrich Engels as they attempt to both understand and subvert the capitalist system. Inevitably, the film traces the conflicts that arise when radical thinkers try to change the world. The material may sound…
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Her Stunningly Intimate Photographs Of Hasidic Life
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. On the coldest day of the year, the Polish photographer Agnieszka Traczewska stands in a snowbound forest an hour’s car ride from Krakow. Dressed in thermal pants and a black scarf, Traczewska has lost track of time in her quest to get a shot of her usually…
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