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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30 Years Before Trump, Tarkovsky Foresaw The Apocalypse
By the time that Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky created his nuclear war parable, “The Sacrifice” (1986), currently playing at the Quad in a new 4K restoration, he had been exiled from one of the Cold War’s superpowers and had been thoroughly nonplussed by the other. Filmed in Sweden, in geographic and spiritual retreat from Moscow…
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Film & TV In A Predominantly Christian Country, Why Is Jewish Humor So Popular?
Jewish Comedy: A Serious History By Jeremy Dauber W. W. Norton & Company, 416 pages, $28.95 Jews are hilarious. We know this, or at least think we do. Just look at all the Jewish cut-ups out there. At the moment, Judd Apatow, Jenji Kohan, Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman are some of the top performers…
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Art German Far-Right Party Attacks Documenta Over Financial Issues
Documenta, Germany’s leading contemporary art festival, which takes place every five years in the city of Kassel, has been sued by far right members of the city’s council. According to a report by Henri Neuendorf in artnet, the councilmembers, who belong to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, are accusing the festival’s leadership of misappropriating…
The Latest
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Art JCC Manhattan To Receive $20 Million Gift and Jenny Holzer Artwork
According to a report in the New York Times, JCC Manhattan has announced that it has received a gift of $20 million from the Meyerson Family Foundation, which also commissioned a site-specific artwork for the center. In honored of the donation, JCC Manhattan will be renamed the Marlene Meyerson JCC, starting in February 2018. The…
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Salinger’s Heirs, Biographers Tussle Over Unpublished Writings That May Not Exist
J.D. Salinger retired in 1965 and died in 2010. What happened in between has become the subject of a restrained controversy, chronicled today by Matthew Haag in The New York Times. Although no new Salinger works have appeared since 1965, and no one close to the writer has said that any will, his admirers still…
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Film & TV How Hedy Lamarr, ‘The Most Beautiful Woman In The World,’ Helped Invent Wi-Fi
When she was a child, Hedy Lamarr’s mother would refer to her as a chameleon. Living up to the moniker, she would go on to lead a surpassingly dramatic life as a Viennese socialite, Hollywood actress, and influential inventor. Her trials and transformations are the subject of Alexandra Dean’s new film, “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr…
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The Russian Jew Who Made Fats Domino A Star
New Orleans singer-pianist Fats Domino, one of the seminal influences on rock ‘n’ roll, died Tuesday in his hometown of New Orleans at age 89. When Domino signed a recording deal with Lew Chudd, owner of Imperial Records, pop history was in the making. The artist recorded a slew of hit singles in the 1950s,…
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Stephen Greenblatt On How The Story Of Adam And Eve Shaped History
Has there been a more consequential story to the history of humanity than that of Adam and Eve? In the assessment of Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Swerve,” probably not. But for Greenblatt, the significance of the origin story of Abrahamic religions ranges past its tangibly profound impact on the…
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Tenement Museum, Nostalgic For The ‘Melting Pot,’ Highlights Contemporary Inequality
1955, the Lower East Side: Eight years after immigrating to the United States, two Holocaust survivors make a home in a six-room apartment. The rooms are big enough to live in comfortably, but only just. In a bedroom decorated in bright colors, its one slit of a window looking down at a staircase, their daughter…
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Art Holocaust Victim And Alleged Murderer’s Solo Show Opens In Amsterdam
Although she was murdered by the Nazis at the age of 26, the prolific German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon managed to leave behind an enormous quantity of paintings, drawings, and sketches. A bountiful 800 paintings comprise her magnum opus, “Life? Or Theatre?” An intensely personal depiction her life during wartime, “Life? Or Theatre?” transcends the purely…
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Why Portland Is A Wretched Place For Jews To Date
I recently spent a month in my hometown, Portland, Oregon. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving back. My high school friends, once dispersed around the country, are back, going on lake cabin trips and having slip-and-slide backyard parties. And it would be nice to live near my family and in the place I…
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