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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Why Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Chelm Stories Aren’t Just For Children
This Month Anne Reads: ”The Fools of Chelm and Their History,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1902 in Leonim, Poland and died in Florida in 1991. In 1978 he won the Nobel Prize for literature bringing joy to Jews everywhere. This came as a vindication of our gifts to the…
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65 Years Ago, The USSR Murdered Its Greatest Jewish Poets. What’s Left Of Their Legacy?
For nearly four decades, no one knew exactly how many Soviet Jews were secretly executed by the Soviet Union in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison on August 12, 1952. A 1970 New York Times report on the fate of Yiddish in the USSR claimed the victims numbered around 30. A 1972 volume commemorating the…
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Why There’s More To Israeli Literature Than Just Hebrew
An unusual session at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem chaired by prominent literary critic Dan Laor celebrated the contributions to Israeli literature of writers writing in languages other than Hebrew. For anyone familiar with Israeli literary history, the subject itself is a big deal — because for decades, non-Hebrew writing was discouraged…
The Latest
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Are The Safdie Brothers The Next Great New York Filmmakers?
The most memorable images of “Good Time,” the new film by brothers and co-directors Josh and Benny Safdie, are those of its protagonist Constantine “Connie” Nikas (Robert Pattinson) in desperate, unceasing motion. There’s Connie fleeing a crime scene in a convulsive sprint, there he is gliding ominously along the highways of eastern Queens in stolen…
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Art The Lost Photographs Of Isaac Bashevis Singer
Editor’s Note In the summer of 2016, the Brooklyn Historical Society’s exhibit “Truman Capote’s Brooklyn” brought new attention to the late photographer David Attie. Attie, who died in 1982, was perhaps best known for his portraits of such luminaries as Capote, Lorraine Hansberry, Leonard Bernstein, Bobby Fischer and Ralph Ellison. Attie had been a commercial…
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Who Owns This Artist’s Legacy — His Family Or Yad Vashem?
In the Płaszów concentration camp, Joseph Bau used paper from cigarettes discarded by Nazis to make a deck of playing cards. But instead of kings, queens and jesters, the young artist illustrated the cards with scenes of normal life before the Nazi invasion: a wedding, a family outing, a doctor’s visit. When fellow prisoners in…
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That Time I Was Mistaken For Son Of Sam
Back in 1977, New York City was gripped by a fear unlike any other I have witnessed, except, of course, during the aftermath of 9/11. It was a reign of terror that saw six people murdered and seven others wounded. Most of those who were attacked were young women. The conventional wisdom was that the…
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Music When Shostakovich Wrote ‘From Jewish Folk Poetry’ And Pissed Off Stalin
The 20th-century Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich might be best known for his conflicted but patriotic symphonies, his daring operas, including two takes on Nikolai Leskov’s novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” or the extent to which, decades after his death on this day in 1975, no one can say authoritatively whether his music was…
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The Secret Jewish History of Barbara Cook
Barbara Cook, the Broadway diva who died on August 8 at age 89, is best remembered for starring in the musicals “Plain and Fancy” (1955), “Candide,” (1956) and “The Music Man” (1957). The long years of cabaret singing that followed may have obscured how much Yiddishkeit was involved in the achievement of this doughty performer….
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Meet The 25-Year-Old Israeli Scientist Who Created Women In Translation Month
August is Women in Translation Month, which aims to bring attention to a depressing and little-known literary fact: women writers are translated far less often than male writers. This means many women writers have almost no chance of being heard outside their home country — and in practical terms, remaining untranslated means a diminished chance…
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What Became of Europe’s Nazi-Looted Libraries?
The rhombicuboctahedronal National Library of Belarus sits on the northwest edge of Minsk, elevated above the surrounding landscape like a Brutalist disco ball. Few passersby would suspect that it’s home to some of the finest Jewish libraries of pre-war Paris, housing thousands of rare volumes that once inhabited the elegant studies and drawing rooms of…
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