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 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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Fascinating Archaeological Matter Reminds Us That Archaeology Used To Matter More
A few weeks ago, the archaeological community was all abuzz at the news of an exceedingly ancient find from the Holy Land: a scrap of papyrus dating back to the seventh century BCE that referred both to a woman and to Jerusalem. Doubts about its authenticity thickened the air — the rarified air, that is,…
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Wonder Boy Michael Chabon Grows Up in ‘Moonglow’
Late in his new novel, “Moonglow,” Michael Chabon describes the surreal, hastily-constructed lunar landscape of a play produced at a mental hospital. The set is clearly absurd – it’s mostly tinfoil – but it still exudes some sourceless magic. “And yet the foil shone in the subaqueous light,” Chabon writes. “The coat racks raising their…
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Woody Allen, Mad Magazine and the Vigoda Brothers Inspire Drew Friedman
Drew Friedman is obsessed with characters at the margins of memory. In his “Old Jewish Comedians” books, his unsparing pen captured faded figures like Benny Rubin and Menashe Skulnik next to stars like Woody Allen and Jerry Lewis. In 2014’s “Heroes of the Comics,” he presented detailed portraits of early comics creators. Now, in “More…
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Move Over, Rodin: 4,000 Year Old “Thinker” Discovered In Israel
Auguste Rodin’s “Thinker,” a ubiquitous image in high-art circles and meme-generating communities alike, has new competition: Haaretz reports an archaeological dig in Yehud has uncovered a Bronze Age ceramic jug featuring a “Thinker”-like figure. (Make that old competition.) Quoted by Haaretz’s Nir Hasson and Ruth Schuster, Gilad Itach, directing the excavation for the Israel Antiquities…
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Mezuzah from a Million Meals
Alexander Rapaport, Executive Director of the Masbia Soup Kitchen, has had a busy year. His soup kitchen, with sites in Flatbush, Coney Island, and Rego Park (Queens), recently overcame months of delays to open a new site in Boro Park. According to their website, they have also “had an almost 350% increase in meal distribution…
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Anne Frank Poem Auctioned For $148,000
In March of 1942, just four months before her family went into hiding from the Nazis, Anne Frank sent a friend an 8-line poem. That handwritten note, recently put up for auction in the Netherlands, just sold for €140,000, the equivalent of $148,000, the BBC reports. Frank sent the poem to the late Christiane van…
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So, Why Were The Rothschilds So Generous?
The Rothschilds: a Dynasty of Art Patrons in France Edited by Pauline Prevost-Marcilhacy Published by Somogy Éditions d’Art, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and Musée du Louvre Éditions. To paraphrase the old Yiddish joke, “If I were Rothschild, I’d be richer than Rothschild; I’d donate some art on the side.” This new three-volume study explains more…
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