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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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…
The Latest
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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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How To See The Vatican’s Hebrew Manuscripts Without Leaving Home
My first-ever trip to the Vatican took place after an exhausting overnight train ride to Rome from Paris with two friends — one deeply Catholic, the other Buddhist — when we were all 20 years old. We were exchange students with little cash but plenty of curiosity; we knew nothing about Rome and nothing about…
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Art 21 Years Later, A Tel Aviv Mural Pays Tribute To Yitzhak Rabin — And Issues A Warning
Elinoy Kisslove is used to receiving odd answers when she asks younger participants in her Tel Aviv graffiti tours what they see in the blurry, black-and-white mural at 26 Florentin Street. “The universe,” someone said to her once. “A womb,” suggested another. Those who live near the mural – mostly 20-somethings attracted to the gentrifying…
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How Trump Team Twists The Torah In War On Knowledge
It was strange to hear the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday, October 31, quote the Book of Joshua as justification for taking scientific experts off of a committee — but it’s also dangerous. And it has deep implications. Here is Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, said when he invoked the Bible: “Joshua…
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