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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The Pleasures and Contradictions of Being Nat Hentoff
The writer and activist Nat Hentoff has died at 91, ‘surrounded by family and listening to Billie Holliday’s music,’ as his son put it on Twitter. Here’s a look back at the bearded, jazz-loving, proudly aetheistic, First Amendment advocate and columnist, written after the release a 2013 documentary about his life and career. The title…
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A Gorgeous Memoir of a Personal Hell
Nobody’s Son: A Memoir By Mark Slouka W.W. Norton & Company, 278 pages, $26.95 For the epigraph of his gorgeous, devastating memoir, Mark Slouka turns to the pre-eminent poet of hell, Dante: “Each one wraps himself in what burns him.” The quotation, it becomes clear, applies to Slouka, his mother and — above all —…
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Meet the Women on the Frontlines Against ISIS — and Their Jewish Predecessors
Stop the presses, the best news item of 2017 has already been written. The Independent reported earlier this week that the “Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) is both widening its operations to include Arab women who want to join the fight against ISIS and stepping up its military assault on the extremists’ de facto capital…
The Latest
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Meet the Jewish Woman Who Helped Lay the Groundwork for Planned Parenthood
Four years before women won the right to vote in the United States, Margaret Sanger — the future founder of Planned Parenthood — and her sister, Ethel Byrne, met a young Jewish immigrant named Fania Mindell. On October 16, 1919, the trio opened the country’s first birth control clinic, located in a tenement in Brownsville,…
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After the Holocaust, Only This Young Composer’s Music Survived
One of the greatest tragedies of the Holocaust (itself the greatest tragedy of modern history) is the irreplaceable loss of talent – not just of the people who were murdered, but also the works, discoveries and inventions that were murdered along with them. Earlier today, the Boston Globe published a story about one of those myriad…
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Barbra Streisand in LA, and 5 More Things to Read, Watch, and Do This Weekend
2017 is fresh, new, and already bringing deaths of beloved public figures – rest in peace, John Berger – extreme political controversy, and simultaneously hilarious and disheartening memes. Never fear; it’s too early to call the year “2016, Part 2,” and there’s enough exciting art, theater, and literature appearing this weekend to cheer even the…
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Martin Scorsese’s ‘Silence’ Explores Faith When God Keeps Quiet
When do you hear the voice of God? Contemporary believers are caught in a conundrum. If they never hear God speaking, or even acting in ways consonant with theology, then surely they must doubt God’s very existence. And yet if they do claim to hear a bat kol – a Divine voice – surely they…
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‘Mein Kampf’ Is Back — And There Are Reasons To Worry About That
Yesterday, news broke that the new annotated version of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” had become a non-fiction best seller in Germany with around 85,000 copies sold. The book had previously been banned from publication in the country (though it could still legally be read if a copy could be found). But in 2015, the copyright,…
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Books Joseph Roth’s ‘The Hotel Years’ Is A Mirror Of Our Times
Although Joseph Roth’s “The Hotel Years” first appeared in 2015, the beginning of 2017 seems, unfortunately, to be the perfect time to open the text. The book is a collection of short pieces that Roth, one of the preeminent journalists of his time (at one point, the Frankfurter Zeitung was paying him at the staggering…
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Remembering Rolf Noskwith, the Jewish Cryptographer Who Helped Beat the Nazis
The cryptographer Rolf Noskwith, who died on January 3 at age 97, proved that “The Imitation Game” could be followed by the hosiery game. As a key member of the team of mathematician Alan Turing, portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the Oscar-nominated film “The Imitation Game,” Noskwith helped break German military codes to win World…
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What Was a Good Jewish Boy Like Him Doing in a Disco Like That?
A “good Jewish boy from New Rochelle” who took up photography after moving to Manhattan, Bill Bernstein got his first freelance assignment from The Village Voice in 1978: Shoot a black-tie dinner for President Jimmy Carter’s mom, Lillian Carter, at a venue called Studio 54. Sensing something sexier when he saw the club readying for…
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