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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Descendants Of Jewish WWII Refugees Reunited With Long-Lost Painting
The painting had quite the journey. Henry and Hertha Bromberg were forced to sell the 16th-century Flemish portrait — attributed to either Joos van Cleve or his son Cornelis — in Paris while fleeing Nazi Germany, the New York Times’s Aurelian Breeden reports. It subsequently moved between a series of art collectors and sellers before…
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If Trump Wants to Outlaw Flag Burning, He Should Look To Israel
Early this morning, Donald Trump tweeted the following: The tweet is possibly a response to the protests occurring at Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Amherst Massachusetts. The protesters are upset that Hampshire decided to remove all flags from its campus after an incident on November 10th or 11th in which the campus’s…
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Jonathan Safran Foer, Deborah Levy And More Make NYT Notable Books List
Last week, the New York Times named its “100 Notable Books of 2016.” Included in their number were many reviewed by the Forward. Those included Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Here I Am,” Michael Chabon’s “Moonglow,” Affinity Konar’s “Mischling,” Boris Fishman’s “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” Deborah Levy’s “Hot Milk,” Adam Kirsch’s “The People and the…
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Will The New Canadian Currency Feature a Jewish Sports Hero?
The Bank of Canada recently announced that it has finished compiling its shortlist of candidates for the “bankNOTEable” campaign – a campaign that will highlight the achievements of one Canadian woman by putting her face on new Canadian banknotes beginning in 2018. Among the 5 women on the shortlist, chosen from over 26,000 nominations, is…
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Art Will Donald Trump Make Golems Great Again?
‘It is said that the Golem lives everywhere and in all times,” wrote the Polish-Jewish writer David Frishman in 1922. Is Donald Trump the Golem of the current age? That tantalizing question is posed at the beginning of the Berlin Jewish Museum’s exhibit about Judaism’s folkloristic man of clay, starkly titled “Golem,” the name stripped…
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What AP Gets Wrong About the Alt-Right — And What We Can Do About It
Copy editors around the world are struggling to write headlines that are accurate in a rapidly changing political landscape, and many are getting flak for calling white racists and anti-Semites what they are now calling themselves: “the alt-right.” Normally, calling someone what they call themselves — such as “environmental activist” — is reasonable, and if…
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When An Actual Nazi Spoke on an American College Campus
Hundreds of college students gathered outside the auditorium carrying signs protesting the evening’s speaker. Dozens inside were poised to heckle him and condemn his views. Many fumed that their university had extended an invitation to a veritable Nazi. The scene could easily describe any number of recent campus protests where students have used inflated rhetoric…
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How Did This Ass Wind Up on a Stained Glass Window?
The biblical Balaam’s reputation centers on striking and eventually talking to his ass — the donkey sort. But as far as rabbinic tradition was concerned, Balaam may as well have been one himself. The prophet, who saw God thwart his effort to curse the Israelites and turn his attacks into blessings, couldn’t see an armed…
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Even At 93, Father Still Knows Best
I often say that at my life’s inception lies a great irony or juxtaposition. My mother, although she was 21 years my father’s junior, died (after a brutal struggle with cancer) when she was just 9 days short of her 41st birthday. My father, who was 62 when she passed, will — G-d willing —…
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During Fraught Immigration Debate, Tenement Museum Pushes For Inclusiveness
The Sweatshop Tour at Manhattan’s Tenement Museum, oriented around the homes and workplaces of two Lower East Side Jewish families at the turn of the 20th Century, includes some surprising facts. Among them is one sure to provoke outrage: that at the time, Eastern European Jews were primarily motivated to immigrate to the United States…
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How Jewish Writers Learned To Loathe Fidel Castro
In February 1961, the Newark-born socialist, anti-Communist poet Louis Ginsberg wrote a fretful letter to his son. The poet Allen Ginsberg, among his many other vagaries, seemed over-optimistic about the Castro regime in Cuba, as his father cautioned: “Visitors tell of being in manipulated throngs chanting pro-Soviet and anti-American slogans in whose frenetic atmosphere it…
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