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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Why We Must Transform Ourselves in the Month of Av
Some months ago, during an interview with a reporter, I remarked matter-of-factly, regarding my marriage of nearly 15 years, “ “I was a shitty husband.” The reporter looked alarmed, as if I’d confessed to hiding corpses in my basement. “Why do you say that?” she asked. I hadn’t meant to be so self-denigrating; I meant…
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America’s Cosmetic Titans Go Head-To-Head In ‘War Paint’
For decades, the two great 20th-century titans of cosmetics, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, feuded, competing for beauty hegemony and celebrity, expressing mutual disdain, and purloining each other’s ideas and employees. At one point, Rubinstein even hired Arden’s ex-husband Tommy Lewis, both a charming philanderer and a gifted salesman. But what if, for all their…
The Latest
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Kafka’s Papers Emerge From The Trial
(JTA) — Papers belonging to writer Franz Kafka will be transferred to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled. The papers are part of the estate of writer Max Brod, a friend and biographer of Kafka. Brod brought the papers with him to Palestine in 1939 when he fled Prague to…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Socialists Need Not Apply Socialists are treyf for the New York City Board of Education, but bribes are apparently kosher. We know this because a local schoolteacher named Gabriel Simon, a well-known socialist active on the Lower East Side, recently took the exam to become a principal and scored the highest…
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Harvey Singer Caught His Prostate Cancer Early. Here’s How.
When the Forward first wrote about Harvey Singer two years ago, he shared his trials of being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008. The Rochester, New York, resident opted for a full mastectomy, only to be diagnosed with prostate cancer 18 months later. Recently, we learned that Singer faced yet another monumental health scare after…
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Watch Out Men, Breast Cancer Gene Can Get You Too
Cancer kept Angel Moses busy. Before even completing the five-year treatment for breast cancer after she was diagnosed in 2003, the disease recurred in the original breast and a new cancer developed in the other. The Chicago resident first found she had the disease when she was just 38. Her age and the occurrence of…
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Can Israeli Startup Use Gene Therapy To Cure Cancer?
In 1944 Harvard installed Mark I, a computerized calculator, to aid physics professor John von Neumann’s work on the Manhattan Project. The one-of-a-kind machine took up most of a room. Today, for $500, you can keep an exponentially more rapid and versatile smartphone in your pocket. Imagine what similarly rapid technological growth might look like…
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How Poet Marianne Moore Was Inspired By the Jews
American modernist poets, including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, were notorious for differing degrees of anti-Semitism, but their colleague Marianne Moore (1887–1972) was uniquely inspired by Jewish tradition and lore. Linda Leavell edited a recently published edition of Marianne Moore’s landmark first poetry collection, “Observations” (1924). She has also published…
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Art The Jewish Story that Chicago’s Art Institute Missed
From now until August 14 at the Art Institute of Chicago, there is a quiet yet remarkable exhibit of 100 photographs by the American artist Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) taken from the Institute’s extensive holdings of his work. The work feels like a retrospective as the photographs show such breadth and range in his images, and…
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The Secret Jewish History of ‘The Little Prince’
As a longtime fan of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book “The Little Prince,” I was thrilled to learn, late last year, of a forthcoming animated film version — and crushed when Paramount abruptly canceled its U.S. release this past March. My spirits soared anew when Netflix announced that it was stepping in; the film, directed by…
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Remembering Zelda Fichandler, ‘Great Founding Rabbi’ of Regional Theater
The American Jewish stage producer, director and educator Zelda Fichandler, who died on July 29 at age 91, was more than just the cofounder of Washington D. C.’s much-lauded Arena Stage and longtime inspiring mainstay at the graduate school of acting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was, as Todd London’s…
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Art Ben Shahn was a radical artist — why didn’t he want to be called a Jewish one?
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