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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Does Stephen Miller Really Want To Take On Emma Lazarus?
Stephen Miller, the white nationalist aide to President Trump took on a somewhat strange new enemy yesterday: Emma Lazarus. Lazarus, a relative of the United States’s first Jewish settler, wrote the poem “The New Colossus” to raise funds for the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1883. That poem, most famous for the lines…
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Why I Regret My Daughters’ Bat Mitzvahs
I have a friend who has an 11 year old son. He’s your typical great kid – smart, athletic, polite. And he has a Bar Mitzvah date set for two years from now. This is my friend’s first foray into the Bar Mitzvah world and she’s jumping in feet first. She’s looking to make a…
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Art Why Käthe Kollwitz’s Art Remains Shockingly Resonant 150 Years Later
When a Jewish businessman in Cologne, Germany, named Franz Levy died in 1937, his family commissioned the renowned German artist Käthe Kollwitz to design his gravestone. Kollwitz, who was not Jewish, sculpted pairs of hands reaching in subtle relief from opposite sides of the stone surface, fingers gripping wrists, holding on. It arouses a feeling…
The Latest
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A Very Personal Guide To Jewish Dating In 2017 (Part I)
Almost every week a Facebook event pops up on my timeline inviting me to mingle at a “20s and 30s” night with other young Jews. Sometimes I wonder if my mom is controlling my feed. I’ve attended at least a dozen of these functions over the past two years, usually with the prospect of meeting…
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Judith Jones, Editor Who Discovered Anne Frank’s Diary, Dies At 93
Judith Jones, the renowned cookbook editor who, early in her career, led the charge for “The Diary of Anne Frank” to be published in English, died yesterday at age 93. Jones, born as Judith Bailey, came upon Frank’s manuscript in a pile of rejected submissions while working as an office assistant at Doubleday in Paris…
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PETA Gave Isaac Bashevis Singer An Incredibly Bizarre Posthumous Award
PETA chose what some may consider a strange way to honor the legacy of both the famed Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Warsaw Uprising, organizing a lunch, hosted by the Polish supermodel Joanna Krupa, at which they awarded Singer a posthumous PETA “Hero to Animals Award.” A PETA press release praised Singer for…
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New Folksbiene Play: Singing Against Trump’s America
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Thirty-five years ago, Zalmen Mlotek and Moishe Rosenfeld co-wrote the script for a musical called “The Golden Land” in honor of the 85th anniversary of the Forverts, the world’s oldest Yiddish newspaper. The goal then was to depict, through Yiddish song, the first decades of Eastern European Jewish immigration…
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History of Planet of the Apes
Spoiler Alert: If you don’t want to know how “War for the Planet of the Apes” ends, you probably should stop reading this article halfway through.) A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a science-fiction movie pitting humans against non-human enemies was unleashed upon the world, and from that moment on, the…
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History Of Sam Shepard
The playwright and actor Sam Shepard, who died on July 27 at age 73, was to all outward appearances as non-Jewish as may be imagined. Yet his writing hovered around such American Jewish creative spirits as Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan and Joseph Chaikin, among others. In such plays as the “Curse of the Starving Class”…
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Remembering Jeanne Moreau — Who Wore A Yellow Star In Solidarity With Jews
The French actress Jeanne Moreau, who died at age 89 on July 31, won immortality as a screen actress of uncommon sensitivity and grace for a long list of major directors, in films such as Jacques Becker’s “Hands Off the Loot” (1954); Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” (1958) and “The Lovers” (1959); François Truffaut’s…
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Does The White House Really Need a Jewish Liaison?
The idea of designating a White House staffer to be in charge of relations with the American Jewish community dates back to the Kennedy administration. It is based on the idea that providing a dedicated channel of communication between the administration and the Jewish community could benefit both sides. From feeling the pulse of the…
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