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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Remembering Jesse Zel Lurie, Witness To A Century Of History
Jesse Zel Lurie, who died in Florida on April 10 at age 103, proved that there was nothing like being on the spot to advance a journalistic career. New York-born in 1913, he made Aliyah in the 1920s and attended high school in Haifa. In 1935, he started writing for The Jerusalem Post, then known…
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Uncovering The Secret Tunnel That Helped Jews Of Vilna Escape The Nazis
“Holocaust Escape Tunnel,” the latest episode in the PBS science series “Nova” follows a group of scholars and engineers as they use the latest ground radar techniques to re-discover an important piece of Jewish history in Vilna. Napoleon called Vilna (now officially Vilnius) the “Jerusalem of the North.” It was home to Elijah ben Solomon…
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These Photos Of Borscht Belt Ruins Changed My Life
I grew up in the “mountains,” or as others called it “the country.” Throughout my entire life, family, friends and neighbors uttered these words as if no other mountains or country existed anywhere else in the wide world. Five years ago when I began working on “The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish…
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Read The Groundbreaking Orthodox Film Story That’s Now An Award Finalist
Editor’s Note: Simi Horwitz’s stories on the Orthodox world have been named a finalist in the prestigious Deadline Club awards. Read her complete story of Orthodox women filmmakers here. The Haredi world is generally viewed as an insular patriarchal community that shuns movies. Virtually nobody owns a TV. Still, a fledgling, shadow film industry has…
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Exclusive Story Of Paul Newman’s Lost Film Now An Award Finalist
Editor’s Note: Allan M. Jalon’s story on the rediscovery of Paul Newman’s film “On The Harmfulness Of Tobacco” has been named a finalist for the Deadline Club Awards in the category of arts reporting. You can read the entire story here. Paul Newman directed a pioneering, independent film shot at a Yiddish theater on Manhattan’s…
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Remembering The Man Who Translated The Holocaust’s Most Haunting Poem
John Felstiner, the distinguished translator and literary scholar who brought Paul Celan into English and who also translated Pablo Neruda, will be remembered at a memorial at Stanford University today. Felstiner taught at Stanford for nearly fifty years, in English, Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature. He is the author of an essential biography of Celan,…
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Forward Writers Earn Two Deadline Club Nominations
Two writers for the Forward have been named finalists for the 2017 Deadline Club Awards. Simi Horwitz is a finalist in the category of Reporting by a Newspaper with Circulation Under 100,000 for her three-part series on Hasidic women. The first item of that series focused on the women helming Orthodox newspapers, the next on…
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‘Oslo,’ Newly Opened On Broadway, Will Head To The Silver Screen
J.T. Rogers’s “Oslo,” which premiered Off-Broadway last spring and opened on Broadway on April 13th, will be moving to the silver screen. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “La La Land” producer Marc Platt will spearhead the play’s screen adaptation. The film will be directed by Barlett Sher, who has directed both New York productions of…
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In These Dark Times, Finally Some Hope And Inspiration On Broadway
To whatever extent there is an argument to be made that Terje Rød-Larsen is Israel’s greatest diplomat — it’s a small extent: he is neither Israeli nor a diplomat, and his great triumph has been rendered essentially defunct — it is currently being made where it should be, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan….
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‘Veep’ Takes On Trump’s Washington, And More To Read, Watch, And Do This Weekend
This weekend, as you take breaks from thinking up creative things to do with matzah — it’s a hard pastime to turn away from, we know — turn your attention first to a host of exciting new books. In nonfiction, there’s Dani Shapiro’s memoir “Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage,” Ben Greenman’s “Dig If You Will the…
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How Richard Gere Went From American Gigolo to American Jew
Joseph Cedar, the Israeli writer-director of the much-admired 2011 film “Footnote,” admitted frankly that he did not seek out Richard Gere to play the Jewish title character in his first English-language film, “Norman, The Moderate Rise And Tragic Fall Of A New York Fixer.” The suggestion was made by one of the film’s producers, Oren…
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