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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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…
The Latest
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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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Folksbiene To Present ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ — In Yiddish
Broadway favorite “Fiddler on the Roof” began life as a Sholem Aleichem story, penned in its author’s native Yiddish. The show will return to that language in summer 2018, in a production by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. As The New York Times’s Sopan Deb reported, Sheldon Harnick, the much-acclaimed lyricist of “Fiddler on the…
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From Gorka To Carlebach: The Forward Staff’s Favorite Articles Of 2017
2017 has, collectively, been few people’s ideas of a fun year. Still, it’s welcomed a wealth of excellent journalism. While we’ve previously celebrated work from other outlets, the Forward’s staff has also chosen our own most exceptional work from this year — our 120th in business. My picks include Sam Kestenbaum’s deeply reported “How This…
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The Faces Of The First Palestinians Born Under Occupation
It looks like a straightforward photography show. 50 photos of 50 different 50-year-olds hang on the walls of a warehouse-turned-gallery in Jaffa. But these photos are of Palestinians, each born in 1967, the year the Occupation began after Israel’s almost miraculous victory in the Six Day War. So, naturally, little about the show has been…
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