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 Modigliani’s Jewishness Informed His Art
In the first room of the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit “Modigliani Unmasked,” a case displays two issues of La Libre Parole, the early-20th century French anti-Semitic newspaper founded by Édouard Drumont. The covers of both feature caricatures of Jewish men, their features overblown and bulbous. Hung on a nearby wall is Modigliani’s 1908 painting “The…
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Adam Gopnik Takes On Two Great Taboos: Ambition, And Sex With His Wife
If you are a recent New York transplant who has found yourself possessed with longing for a time when the city must have felt more authentic, when you might have wandered the streets with great minds, shopped in distinctive stores, and felt exalted feelings, Adam Gopnik has a cure. Two words: Rodents and insects. “All…
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What Jews Can Learn From ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
When Margaret Atwood published “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1984, the dystopian genre in literature was about to change. The books that had defined it, including Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” had been preoccupied with the threat of socialist totalitarianism. Atwood wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale” in West Berlin, in the shadow of…
The Latest
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The Secret Jewish History of Cat Stevens Revisited
When I went off to sleep-away camp in 1972 for the first time, the soundtrack of the summer — especially for those like me, who arrived with guitar in hand — was all Cat Stevens, all the time. By 1972, Stevens had already achieved his greatest success with a stunning trio of albums released in…
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How Emmy Runner-Up Jackie Hoffman Journeyed From Shtetl to Hollywood to Broadway
At last night’s Emmy Awards, actress Jackie Hoffman gained notoriety for seeming, uh, ungracious for her reaction to losing out on a trophy to Laura Dern. To commemorate (or observe) that open, we’re re-running our interview with the actress from earlier this year. Actress/comedienne Jackie Hoffman has long been a fixture on the New York…
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Paranoia, Spies and Ariel Sharon in Nathan Englander’s Twisty New Thriller
Dinner at the Center of the Earth By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $26.95 In his fiction, Nathan Englander has written with uncommon verve about the varieties of Jewish experience. Among other subjects, he’s tackled the Holocaust and its legacy (“The Tumblers,” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”) the…
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Books The Rebbetzin’s Guide: What To Bring Your Host For Rosh Hashanah
So you’re invited out for a Rosh Hashanah meal — and you’re stuck as to what to bring? We’ve got you covered. For The Gourmand We’re itching for a copy of celebrity Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s Sweet (his publisher should have timed the release better, with the chief holiday of sweets upon us now), but…
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Books In Leaving Orthodoxy, Tova Mirvis Voices Questions Many Secretly Harbor
I was not raised in modern Orthodoxy; I married into it. And as I read Tova Mirvis’ memoir, The Book of Separation, it often felt as though I was reading my own misgivings and hesitations. Her book opens with a chronicling of her first Rosh Hashanah, after leaving her marriage and Orthodox Judaism. Mirvis grew…
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The Global Economic Crisis — Seen In The Outstretched Hands of Berlin’s Poor
I park my bicycle in front of the organic grocery store and lock it among the others. I’m proud of my bike, a Gudereit Fantasy Classic, which together with the lock and child seat cost around eight hundred euros or close to a thousand dollars. Among the other bikes stationed there it is nothing special….
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Does Ionesco’s ‘Rhinoceros’ Lose Something in Yiddish Translation?
New Yiddish Rep’s (NYR) 2013 production of “Waiting For Godot,” staged to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s great existential comedy, was ground-breaking. Its Yiddish speaking characters cast a new, more profound light on the masterpiece. Indeed, they evoked Holocaust survivors wandering across a post-apocalyptic landscape, especially as they talked about the ashes and…
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New Digital Platform To Bring Jewish Family History To Life
Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History has launched an interactive digital platform for Jewish families to explore their heritage. Called “Re:collection,” it invites Jews to upload and curate media that helps to tell the stories of themselves and their ancestors, exchanging familial narratives with other participants. It was created by the museum in collaboration…
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