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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Italy Tells The Story Of Its Jewish People In New Museum
“The story of Jews in Italy is really an Italian story,” Dario Disegni said one recent autumn morning at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies. Disegni, president of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, was appearing at Columbia to discuss the museum, which is also known as MEIS, opens in Ferrara…
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Why Are So Many Jewish Podcasts So Bad — And What Can We Do About It?
Podcasting, you may have heard, is booming. Listenership is up, so is awareness of the medium, and high-quality podcasts seem to be popping up everywhere. As with television, the medium itself has recently become more respectable, including among the Hollywood A-listers; Oscar Isaac stars in “Homecoming,” while an episode of “Reply All” is being adapted…
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That Time Two Jewish Con Artists Got Way More Than They Bargained For
During the early twentieth century, the New York–based socialist daily, Forverts, the progenitor of the very Forward you are currently reading, was the largest and most successful Yiddish newspaper in the world. Among the local, national, and international news, editorial, literary, and entertainment pieces it printed, the Forverts also commissioned original reporting on all manner…
The Latest
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Music The Secret Jewish History of ‘You’re Sixteen,’ That Song Joel Pollak Was Yammering About
The old rockabilly standard “You’re Sixteen,” first made famous by Johnny Burnette in 1960 and then revived by Ringo Starr in 1973, is back in the news again after right-wing commentator Joel Pollak, of Breitbart News, referred to the pop hit in defense of Alabama Republican Senatorial candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of…
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Lilli Hornig Fled Hitler And Helped Develop Atomic Weapons — Then Fought Against Their Use
Lilli Hornig, the Czech-born Jewish chemist who died on November 17 at age 96, showed an exemplary interest in what in the “Pirkei Avot” a book of the Mishnah, is termed g’milut chasadim, or acts of loving kindness. Hornig’s family, many of whom were scientists, fled their homeland in the early 1930s after her father…
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Movie News: ‘Call Me By Your Name,’ Barbra Streisand And Sacha Baron Cohen
In my family, movies are an essential part of Thanksgiving: Most years, my cousins in Chicago and I will go see a blockbuster on Thanksgiving morning, returning just late enough to be met by parental panic over making sure things are done on time. (Yes, we also help out.) This year I’m staying in New…
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Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster Make New York Times List Of 2017’s Best Books
Novels by Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster and David Grossman are among the 100 books named to The New York Times’s 2017 list of the year’s 100 most notable books. Krauss’s “Forest Dark,” Auster’s “4 3 2 1” and Grossman’s “A Horse Walks Into a Bar,” which won this year’s Man Booker International Prize, won commendations…
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Film & TV Michael Showalter, Known For His Comedy, Discusses The Seriously Dark ‘Search Party’
Best known for the zany TV comedies “The State” and “Stella” and feel-good films “Wet Hot American Summer” and “The Big Sick,” Michael Showalter might not be the person you’d expect to find behind an ambitious new noir. Yet as producer of the TBS comedy “Search Party,” the second season of which premiered on Sunday,…
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Should We Give Ayn Rand A Second Chance? Tony Award-Winning Director Says Yes.
An excellent way to win the scorn of your coworkers, I have learned over the past month, is to display Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” on your desk. (Yes, dear colleagues, Rand was Jewish, born as Alisa Rosenbaum in pre-revolutionary Russia. No, dear colleagues, I am not turning into an individualist psychopath, or…
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Art We Went To The Museum Of The Bible — So You Don’t Have To
Entering the Museum of the Bible was a little like getting on a plane to Israel — it was a mess trying to get through security. There was a kind of honeycombed bomb-sniffing device, tall as a man, that a French correspondent said reminded her of something from “Star Trek.” A newspaper reporter from Alabama…
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The Incredible, Mysterious, And Sometimes Even Erotic Dream Diary Of Ab Cahan
Abraham Cahan’s many kholoymes, his dreams, can be checked off his proverbial bucket list. His life’s work of a Yiddish paper is still going strong 120 years later. His desire to literally have that paper’s presence dominate Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the muse behind our historic building at 175 East Broadway, shapes the neighborhood’s skyline…
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