Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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The Jewish Museum in a Town With Only One Jew In It
From Berlin to Moscow; London to Vienna; Copenhagen, Denmark, to Budapest, Hungary, and, recently, Warsaw, Poland, the map of Europe is dotted with museums dedicated to the history and culture of Jewish communities past and present. Although the Jewish Museum in Prague dates back to 1906, the majority of Jewish museums now on a Jewish…
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Why Dead Languages Like Akkadian Still Matter
I grew up hearing the Code of Hammurabi read out loud, in Akkadian, at the dining-room table. I did not know that my graduate-student mother was one of Akkadian’s few regular readers. The language of the ancient Akkad region, or modern-day Iraq, is considered a “dead language,” just like Ugaritic and Phoenician. All these dead…
The Latest
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How in the World Did Cuneiform Cookies Become a Thing?
Cuneiform cookies? Yes, they are a thing. Though it has been centuries since Akkadian was spoken, cuneiform writing has had an unexpected burst of popularity as a cookie decoration. The idea started with Katy Blanchard, the Fowler/Van Santvoord Keeper of the Near Eastern Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in…
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How To Say Kaddish For Your Father in 7 Different Cities
Just over a month ago, my dearly beloved father, Dr. Stephen S. Kutner z”l, passed away, right before my family and I had planned to take a complicated three-week East Coast road trip. After sitting shiva we decided to go through with the trip. And as a Jew mourning an immediate family member, that meant…
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Keeping Up With the Cohens
People collect, display and hang on to stuff for all sorts of reasons. Either they relish the thrill of acquisition, enjoy the company of their things or see them as a hedge against invisibility. What people collect is equally as varied as their motivations. Some lovingly assemble a collection of rocks, others pile up photographs…
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On 15th Anniversary Of 9/11, Sculptor Shows City In Mourning
'I think when anyone ever grieves or thinks they think in their own vocabulary'
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Masha Gessen Journeys to a Jewish Land Without Jews
For a couple of weeks several years ago, my Facebook wall filled up with photos from friends participating in the First International Summer Yiddish Program in Birobidzhan, the capital city of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia’s Far East. These were delightful group pictures taken next to the main points of interest for visiting Yiddishists…
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‘Demon’ Is a Holocaust Ghost Story That Bravely Confronts Poland’s Past
A ghost story about the Holocaust seems like an atrociously bad idea. Besides insulting the memory of the victims and cheapening the crime, the metaphorical ghosts of the Holocaust are real enough without making literal specters of them. Only a profit-seeking schlock peddler would try to mix paranormal hoo-ha with pseudo-historical genocide fiction. Yet that’s…
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Film & TV Leonard Nimoy Wasn’t Just Spock — He Was My Dad
September 8th, 2016 is Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary. Read Adam Nimoy’s ode to his father, Leonard Nimoy — the original Spock — originally published in the Forward in June, 2015. Leonard Nimoy passed away on February 27th, 2015. Last year, I approached my father, Leonard Nimoy, about collaborating on a documentary about Mr. Spock, his…
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Disco Is Alive and Well in Tel Aviv
It’s 10:30 p.m. on a Friday night in Tel Aviv and young Israelis, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, vintage floral print dresses, and man buns are sipping drinks in a dimly lit bar. A Lebanese track from the 1979 “Belly Dance Disco” album by Ihasan al-Munzer plays in the background. The music with its thick unmistakably Lebanese…
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Film & TV Why The New ‘Ben Hur’ Is the Least Successful Adaptation Of All
“Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ” was the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, beating out “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” There were a million copies printed of the 1913 edition, an American record at the time. It would stay on the top of the charts (just under the Christian bible) until “Gone With The Wind”…
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