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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Film & TV
Will ‘Wizard Of Lies’ Bring Out The Anti-Semites? Barry Levinson Doesn’t Care
There is a major surprise in “The Wizard of Lies, Barry Levinson’s film about the Bernie Madoff scandal, which premieres on May 20 on HBO and is based on the reporting of Diana B. Henriques: It’s possible to feel a modicum of sympathy for a despicable human being. The film stars Robert DeNiro as Bernie…
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Supreme Court Justice: Etgar Keret Is Israel’s ‘Young Boswell’
I’ve always thought that to be Jewish was to live the life of the mind. What do I mean by that? I mean that what I have always seen as the core of our Jewish identity, the engine that has driven us through the centuries, is the intellectual package of values we carried with us…
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WATCH: New Documentary Explores Etgar Keret’s World
“Etgar in person is very much like he is on the page, always telling extremely short stories,” Jonathan Safran Foer says, in a new trailer for the upcoming documentary “Etgar Keret: Based on a True Story.” Keret, an Israeli author, has gained a reputation for having a more creative approach to reality than most. In…
The Latest
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Why Trump Must Not Meet With Sudanese President al-Bashir
President Trump, you may have heard, is soon embarking on the first international trip of his presidency – to Saudi Arabia, Israel, The Vatican, Italy and Brussels. What you may not have heard is that while in Saudi Arabia, there is a possibility that Trump will not only meet with King Salman, who is currently allegedly…
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The Female Nude Is Triter Than Ever — Just Look at Anselm Kiefer
Much of German artist Anselm Kiefer’s work can be captured (to the extent that art can ever be described with total accuracy) in a single word: ruin. Kiefer, born in southwest Germany in 1945 just two months before the end of World War II, has dedicated a large portion of his oeuvre to reckoning with…
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How The Yom Kippur War Started American Trucker Culture — And Mannheim Steamroller
When I was growing up in Colorado, my father and I would regularly drive by a truck stop slightly north of Denver called Deno’s 6 & 85. We always talked about stopping in, although we never did. With 70s-era bright neon signs advertising steak and cocktails, the roadside restaurant seemed like a home for frank,…
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Books Israel’s City of the Future: Portrait of a Smug Society
Excerpted from the book “No Country for Jewish Liberals.” This is a political and personal story about Israel, about how over the years it went one way and I went the other. I’m going to start where I live, literally—in the city (actually the sprawling suburban bedroom community) of Modi’in, which is truly a showcase…
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Tony Kushner Is ‘Wildly Alarmed’ But Still Hopeful
Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of the two-part play “Angels in America,” has never been an advocate of absolute pessimism. Written in the height of the AIDS crisis, “Angels in America” confronted the disease’s physical and social ravages — and the heartless, cruel unresponsiveness of the American government — with a transcendent grace, if…
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Madeleine Albright, On Her 80th Birthday, Is Still Unstoppable
Former Secretary of State and current badass Madeleine Albright turns 80 on May 15, 2017. Here are 8 things about her worth celebrating: 1) Her incredible career Albright wasn’t just the first female Secretary of State. She’s been a professor of International Relations at Georgetown University for decades, served as an Ambassador to the United…
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Jewish Writers Star At New American Writers Museum
Ann Landers and Susan Sontag. Allen Ginsberg and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gertrude Stein and Shel Silverstein. And a pioneering journalist named Ab Cahan. When the American Writers Museum opens on the second floor of a Chicago office building this week, Jewish visitors will find themselves well-represented. Jewish names loom large here, from a “Visionaries and…
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Even Now, My Jewish Mother Still Brings Me Home
Broke and broken at 31, I fled to the Czech Republic, where I taught English during the day and did theater at night. I was trying to recover from sexual violation and from the circumstances of my life: hateful day jobs and bad boyfriends in ponytails. It was no coincidence I was 5,000 miles away…
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