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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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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What Bar Mitzvahs For Girls Were Like In 1921
Note from translator Chana Pollack: Born in 1885 in Rakow in the Minsk region of Belarus to a family of carpenters, Berl Botwinick, the author of this essay, was the winner of the Forverts’ 1909 story contest, with a piece about Jewish American life entitled “Shabes Morning.” By 1913, Botwinick was a full time employee….
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How The ‘Alt-Right’ Normalizes White Supremacy
Making Sense of the Alt Right By George Hawley Columbia University Press, 232 pages $28.00 Since World War II, American political life has been defined, in part, by a rejection of overt anti-Semitism. Following the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, conservatives and liberals alike have largely agreed that anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitic dog whistles, should…
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Silence Is Golden In Todd Haynes’s ‘Wonderstruck’
It’s a bizarre thing to say about a film that started life as a graphic novel, but the soundtrack is the key component of “Wonderstruck,” the new movie by director Todd Haynes. Based on the work of the same name by Brian Selznick (of “Hugo” fame), who wrote the screenplay, it traces the strangely entwined…
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How My Bat Mitzvah Turned Me Off Judaism
This is the fifth in a series of essays examining Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in America. On March 25, 1978, the day after my bat mitzvah, I announced to my parents that I was done with Judaism and would never again set foot in a synagogue. Some of my disgust with Hebrew school was no…
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Film & TV Gay And Jewish Themes Converge Once Again In ‘Torch Song’
“I have taught myself to sew, cook, fix plumbing, do taxes; I can even pat myself on the back when necessary,” Arnold Beckoff tells his mother. “All so I don’t have to ask anyone for anything. There is nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect. And anyone who can’t give me those…
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Books A Fable About a Modern King David
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The American writer Joshua Cohen’s last two books, Book of Numbers and Witz, were considerable epic novels that dealt with philosophical issues through a mix of satirical realism and grotesque fantasy. But his new book, “Moving Kings” (both a name of a company and an allegorical key),…
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When Halloween Was Just Purim For Kids
It’s difficult today to look at the orange-and-black paper scenery behind toddlers in ghost costumes and imagine just how disturbing Halloween was a century ago. For the Jewish community — coming from Europe — the devilish practices of Halloween were not only bewildering but also threatening. Yes, we could come to terms with people walking…
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