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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How Publishers Are Already Taking Action Against Trump’s “Muslim Ban”
Comma Press is the first publisher to respond to the “Muslim ban” with a pledge to spend 2018 exclusively publishing work from the seven countries whose citizens are currently barred from entering the U.S. “We have decided to feature on our translation imprint only writers from the countries affected by the ban – Syria, Iraq,…
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Spicer Continues The White House’s Disgraceful Line On The Holocaust
It should come as no surprise that “I’m sorry” does not seem to be in the current administration’s vocabulary. Following the widespread backlash against Donald Trump’s disgraceful Holocaust Memorial Day statement (you can read my piece on all the statement’s problems here), White House Secretary Sean Spicer doubled down on the statement in a press…
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How Trump’s Muslim Ban Is Being Translated Into Other Languages
The Trump administration’s ban on Muslims from seven nations entering the country has caused mass protests at airports worldwide — but how it is being reported globally is often a matter of translation. In Italy, “they are calling it a “legge razziale” or racial law, which directly ties it to the Italian racial laws instituted…
The Latest
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Who Ever Heard of an Irish Jew?
“Who ever heard of an Irish Jew?” It is a question that has been employed over time as an insult, an unlikely conversation starter, and the title of a celebrated short story collection. It is also a question I have been asked constantly since the publication of my own Irish-Jewish novel, “Nine Folds Make a…
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Why Andrew Ramer Is One of Our Most Righteous Men
Having spent 20 part-time years in the Jewish professional world, I’ve come to appreciate the Kabbalistic concept of the lamed-vavniks, the 36 righteous people who, hidden from view, are secretly maintaining the world by their good deeds. What I mean is, the Jewish teachers, leaders, innovators, and mensches who inspire me are mostly lesser known…
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My Short and Bittersweet Relationship With an Online BFF
‘Needing brunch places in downtown Manhattan” was the posting I chose to respond to when looking through the online travel forum. It was payback time, my turn to help someone else. I was grateful for the suggestions I’d received from others when searching for a Mexican beach resort that wouldn’t require packing Imodium. To figure…
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The 26 Books We’re Sure To Be Reading This Year
Winter is theoretically a fabulous time for curling up with a hot drink and a book, although that’s a peculiar sentence to write on a 60-degree day in New York. Still, the cold weather will inevitably return, and with it the need to read, read, read. Our favorite picks for the endeavor —in fiction, nonfiction,…
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Reclusive Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter Suing Over Stolen DNA
You’d be forgiven for not knowing of Ike Perlmutter, even though he is the CEO of Marvel Entertainment; the Israeli-born executive is a notorious recluse. For a recluse, particularly a powerful and wealthy businessman, all theft is an immense transgression – even the theft of DNA. You read that right, Perlmutter is alleging that someone…
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Is This Sugarcane Plantation ‘America’s Auschwitz’?
The April issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a piece entitled “Inside America’s Auschwitz,” on the Whitney Plantation as “a rebuke – and an antidote to our sanitized history of slavery.” I came across this piece online, and I was drawn to the provocative headline as well as the setting, a town less than an hour…
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Trump’s Holocaust Remembrance Day Statement Is A Threefold Disgrace
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. But “Holocaust Remembrance” is not as clear cut a phrase as it might seem. In Poland, the government is suing Holocaust scholar Jan Gross over his work on the country’s role in the genocide. In Lithuania, another blood-soaked nation that refuses to reckon with its past, we see…
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David Ben-Gurion Makes An Argument For Israel, And More of The Forward Looking Back
100 Years Ago The Brownsville section of Brooklyn is so Jewish that in the local courthouse you’ll find a clerk who speaks a beautiful Yiddish. In the police station there’s a Jewish captain who also speaks good Yiddish. And what neighborhood sends a socialist assemblyman to Albany? Brownsville. There’s even a Hasidic rebbe, over whose…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
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Fast Forward As anti-LGBTQ laws spread, these two Jewish nonprofits are funding moves to safer states
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Culture At this interfaith calligraphy class, the lines between Jew and Muslim blur