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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How Aharon Appelfeld Found His Home In Hebrew
In Philip Roth’s novel “Operation Shylock”, a fictional Israeli writer named Aharon Appelfeld offers warnings about an identity thief targeting the narrator. In real life, Appelfeld, who died on January 4 at age 85, cautioned readers about what losing Jewish cultural identity might lead to. With a laconic, unelaborate style echoing his soft-spoken manner in…
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The Jewish Picasso Is Finally Ready For His Close-Up
A Twenty Minute Silence Followed By Applause By Shawn Wen Sarabande Books, 131 pages, $15.95 In 1974, the legendary mime Marcel Marceau appeared in a TV advertisement for Xerox color copy machines. The ad lasted 90 seconds, during which — as the writer Shawn Wen describes in her recent book on Marceau, “A Twenty Minute…
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Winter Storm Grayson Doesn’t Match The Great Blizzard Of ‘88
In the days before storms were given hipster names and the meteorologists were dropping bomb cyclones on it, the East Coast used to look back with dread at the storm of ’88. The Great Blizzard of 1888 was the great grand-daddy of storms, with up to 58 inches of snow drifting with powerful winds up…
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Art On His 125th Birthday, Solomon Yudovin’s Art Instructs On The Importance Of Jewish Identity
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In honor of the 125th birthday of Russian-Jewish artist Solomon Yudovin, a modest yet captivating exhibit at Russia’s St. Petersburg Jewish Community Center highlights some of his best work, including historical photographs, drawings and book illustrations. Of particular interest: A number of his watercolors from the 1930s,…
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Books Aharon Appelfeld, Israeli Author, Dies At 85
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld, who published more than 45 books in Hebrew and translated into many languages, has died. Appelfeld, whose most recent book was published three months ago, died early Thursday at the age of 85. Most of Appelfeld’s fiction dealt in some way with the Holocaust, mainly its effect on…
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Class Conflict Is At The Heart Of Mad Men Creator’s New Thriller
HEATHER, THE TOTALITY By Matthew Weiner Little, Brown & Co, 144 pages, $22.50 Meet Mark and Karen Breakstone. They got married a little late in life: “Karen was nearly 40 and had given up on finding someone as good as her father.” Some friends introduced her to Mark, who, at first has only “his potential…
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Q & A: Reza Aslan On The Trouble With God’s Humanity
“I always thought that I would write a book about the history of God,” Reza Aslan said. Aslan, an author, professor and former CNN host — his show “Believer” was canceled after he tweeted a profane reaction to President Trump’s comments on a July 2017 terrorist attack in London — was discussing his latest book,…
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How Do You Say ‘Mansplaining’ In Israel — A Country Where So Many People Do It?
In Israel, where everyone has an opinion, it may seem difficult to separate mansplaining from regular telling-you-exactly-what-I-think as well as telling-you-exactly-what-you-should-do-with-your-life-because-I-know-best. But there is, in fact, a charming and relatively new Hebrew word that is equivalent to the English term “mansplaining”—and that word is hasgvara. The Israeli version of mansplaining combines the ancient and the…
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How Hobby Lobby Appropriates Jewish Culture To Shill For Christ
Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby By Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden Princeton University Press, 240 pages, $29.95 The members of the Green family, who own the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, are evangelical Christians and billionaires best known for persuading the Supreme Court that their religious principles entitled their…
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Why Louise Bourgeois Is My New Personal Role Model
Well, it’s decided: When I grow up I want to be Louise Bourgeois. Oh, fine, I know, I am full grown, but then Bourgeois did live to be 98, so it’s somewhat relative. Not that the longevity is in and of itself impressive. It’s what she did with all that time, the use she put…
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Music This Bang-Up Music Doc Is One You Should Have Seen In 2017
I first started digging for old records in thrift stores in the late 1980s, back when you could still score stacks of 45s from the glory days of AM radio at 5 or 10 cents a pop. In the course of each thrift store foray, I would almost inevitably come across a single or two…
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