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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Go See These Four Medieval Haggadot At The Met – Just In Time For Passover
If you’re having a hard time getting into the Passover spirit this year (is this a thing?), then The Met might have the antidote you’re looking for. Starting on April 10th, The Met will be displaying four European Haggadot created between 1300 and 1515 on loan from the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in…
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Well, This Certainly Is The Most Inappropriate Haggadah For Passover
For This We Left Egypt?” By Dave Barry, Alan Zweibel and Adam Mansbach Flat Iron Books, 144 pages, $19.99 Let’s face it, seders can be boring. Jews want to eat and there’s this long text cock-blocking their way to the brisket. Sure, it’s punctuated with a few nice songs and maybe some interesting discussion, but…
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How Trump’s Budget Cuts Will Directly Impact Jewish Culture
On March 16, the Trump administration released a 62-page document titled “America First: A Budget Blueprint To Make America Great Again.” In an introductory note, President Trump wrote, “I submit to the Congress this Budget Blueprint to reprioritize Federal spending so that it advances the safety and security of the American people. Our aim is…
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Why You’ll Need A New Haggadah For Trump’s America
Why is this year different from all other years? On all other years, we celebrate new Haggadot together, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives. We disagree about many things, and we argue about them at the Seder. But this year, as we watch a minority-elected president attack the press, the courts, immigrants and allies around…
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Major Arthur Szyk Collection Given To University Of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life is about to become home to a major collection of the works and personal papers of Arthur Szyk, thanks to a gift from the Bay Area-based Taube Philanthropies. Szyk, who was born to a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland in 1894, was a…
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Why Yevgeny Yevtushenko Made Jews Wary
In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who died on April 1 at age 84, published the poem “Babi Yar” in Russia’s “Literary Newspaper” (Literaturnaya Gazeta). The poem objected to Soviet refusal to recognize that Jews were the principal target at Babi Yar in present-day Kiev, Ukraine, where thousands of Jewish men, women and children were murdered by…
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How The Fearless Adventurer Ruth Gruber Joined My Writing Group
My friend Ruth Gruber, who recently died late last year at age 105, was born before women could vote and lived long enough to cast her lot with Hillary. Reading her extraordinary obituary, I thought: she never got to see an American female president. Yet she did get the last word. We met in 1987,…
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100 Years Ago, Immigration Policy Was Just As Crucial — And Controversial
Two contrasting images in “1917: How One Year Changed The World,” at Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History, demonstrate the volatility of American attitudes toward immigrants.A World War I poster cautioning against food waste is also a hopeful narrative of arrival and assimilation. A cluster of immigrants gaze from a ship toward the Statue…
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My Father The Rabbi, My Father The Mystic
Whenever someone greets me, it’s inevitably, “Hi Lynn, how’s your father?” My incredibly interesting and unusual father departed from life as we know it a few months ago. It is still extremely difficult to put that z”l after his name, and even more difficult to have to relate the news to each one of these…
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Did One Of Spain’s Greatest Artists Actually Have A Feminist Streak?
Israel’s official relationship with Spain is only 30 years old, and is being celebrated with a remarkable exhibit of prints and paintings by the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828), now on view at The Israel Museum, in Jerusalem. Unofficially, of course, Spain occupies a unique space in the history and memory of the Jewish…
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This Israeli Conductor Wants To Use Music To Fix The World
David Ben Gurion once stated that “it is in the Negev that the creativity and pioneer vigor of Israel shall be tested,” but he probably wasn’t thinking about opera. Omer Meir Wellber, born in 1981 in Be’er Sheva, the largest city in the Negev desert of southern Israel, has carved out an international career as…
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