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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Covering Simon And Garfunkel Brought This Heavy Metal Star Back To His Jewish Roots
(JTA) — Before David Draiman became famous as the singer of the heavy metal band Disturbed, he trained to be a cantor. That didn’t go so well. Growing up in Chicago, he was expelled from three different yeshivas, and after a rowdy night of Purim drinking as a teenager, he blew up his high school rabbi’s…
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Meet The Philosopher Who’s A Favorite Of Steve Bannon And Mussolini
Steve Bannon is a confusing man. On the one hand, he sells outrageously conservative films; on the other, he made a ton of money off of Seinfeld. On the one hand, he critiques capitalism with an almost Marxist fervor; on the other, he’s an advisor to a crony capitalist real estate mogul. One place where…
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Is That An Angel On Time’s Cover — Or Just Chuck Schumer?
Last week, Time Magazine gave us a glimpse of evil with their Steve Bannon cover. This week, with their Chuck Schumer cover photo (taken by Platon), they’ve given us the opposite (aesthetically speaking). In terms of composition, the two covers are remarkably similar – two faces front and center, nothing else (aside from those hands in…
The Latest
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Books How To Walk In The Shadow Of Death
This article originally appeared on Plus61J. If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present. —Lao Tzu I believe it is true that, at least in our thoughts, past, present, and future converge…
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Can Microdosing LSD Fix Mood Swings? Ayelet Waldman Tried To Find Out.
Ayelet Waldman was sewing when she picked up the phone, trying to fix a top with a neckline that dipped slightly too low. Her husband, she confessed, is better with a needle than she is, but she’s learning. That husband is the novelist Michael Chabon, and when it comes to their shared life — four…
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Why Was This Italian Artist So Interested in Painting Synagogues?
Nearly 275 years after Alessandro Magnasco’s death, experts still aren’t sure what to make of his work — particularly four paintings of synagogues. Known as il Lissandrino, Magnasco was born 350 years ago Feb. 4th. He wasn’t Jewish, but synagogues were among his most frequent subjects, notes the Cleveland Museum of Art, which owns “Interior…
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Stephen Sondheim Awarded Prestigious PEN Literary Honor
Stephen Sondheim will receive the 2017 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award, PEN America announced on Wednesday. The organization, which advocates for freedom of literary expression worldwide, annually gives the honor to a writer who, according to their website, “helps us to understand the human condition in original and powerful ways.” Sondheim is the first composer-lyricist…
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Art How the Art World Is Responding to Trump’s Muslim Ban
Hundreds of artists and dozens of prominent museums around the world have signed a strongly worded open letter calling for a reversal of the ban on entry to the US for citizens of seven mostly Muslim countries. “We the undersigned individuals of the international contemporary art field call for the immediate and total overturning of…
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Before Trump, Philip Roth Took Aim At The ‘Grotesquerie’ Of Ronald Reagan, Too
Back in January, Philip Roth gave an email interview in the New Yorker in which he was asked to respond to the election of Donald Trump. In a string of fittingly eloquent invective, Roth called Trump “humanly impoverished,” and “incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency.” “It isn’t Trump as…
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Books Have You Got a Story for Us? Sweepstakes Winners
On a brisk December night, a crowd gathered into the Center for Jewish History anticipating the launch of an exciting new book. “Have I Got a Story for You” translated 42 astonishing Yiddish stories into English for the first time. The touching collection of Yiddish stories intertwined the old world and the new, traditional and…
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How Comics Help Us Combat Holocaust Fatigue
You might not remember where you were when you first saw a panel from Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” but you probably do remember how you felt: shocked. Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, the Holocaust presented in the form of classic cartoon enmity. What could be stranger, more unsettling? Here’s what: discovering that the first artist…
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