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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Anne Frank Center Hits Back At Trump Over Looming Immigration Orders
News broke yesterday that President Donald Trump would, today, sign executive orders that require the construction of a Mexican border wall, halt entry to the country for Syrian refugees, and suspend entry for travelers from majority-Muslim countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. Today, the Anne Frank Center For Mutual Respect, the Otto Frank-founded American affiliate…
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Milo Yiannopoulos Publisher Hits Back Over Lucrative Book Deal
When infamous Breitbart senior editor and proponent of the so-called “alt-right” Milo Yiannopoulos was offered a $250,000 book contract deal from Threshold Editions, a Simon & Schuster imprint, authors, critics, and artists responded with fury. (The Chicago Review of Books, for instance, responded by announcing that it would review no Simon & Schuster titles in…
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What Red State Jews Tell Us About Ourselves — and Trump’s America
Since the November election, there’s been a lot of talk among journalists about the way our profession overlooked and misunderstood populist, pro-Trump America. It’s a challenge for us at the Forward, as well. That is why we are launching “Red State Jews.” Our aim is to use all the platforms of the Forward — news,…
The Latest
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Did a 1980s Spy Novel Inspire Trump’s Love For Russia — And His Run For President?
Is a spy novel from the early 1980s, penned by a former British intelligence officer preoccupied with the post-World War II relationships of Germany, Russia, the United States, and – occasionally – Israel, responsible for President Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the office of Commander in Chief? In another political season, that question might provoke a…
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Largest Collection of Hebrew Books Sold to Israel Library
The National Library of Israel has just acquired the largest private collection of Hebrew books and manuscripts in the world — including rare treasures such as a 1491 chumash from Lisbon, Portugal, and one of only two surviving copies of a 1556 Passover Haggadah from Prague. The complex deal for the famed Valmadonna Trust Library,…
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The Secret Jewish History of McDonald’s
There’s more than meets the eye in the title of “The Founder,” the new biopic of Ray Kroc. For while Kroc carefully cultivated his image as “the founder” of McDonald’s, two brothers named McDonald invented their namesake restaurant chain. By the time Kroc — a traveling salesman played by Michael Keaton in the film —…
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Approaching His 80th Birthday, Philip Glass Still Fighting ‘Minimalist’ Label
Phillip Glass, who turns 80 on Jan 31st, is a man struggling with his legacy, at least how it exists in the popular mind. “If people called me an American opera composer it would have the virtue of being what I actually do”, he told the Guardian yesterday. “This is reality. God forbid we should…
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What Netflix’s ‘Bojack Horseman’ Tells Us About Assimilation
‘BoJack Horseman,’ Netflix’s animated comedy featuring an anthropomorphic celebrity horse, is about the American crisis of authenticity. BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) is a washed-up sitcom actor who lives in a dystopian Hollywood where Wolf Blitzer reports on supermarket scuffles and a resurrected J.D. Salinger is a game show writer. The protagonist wonders what he…
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How To Listen to Tchaikovsky While Looking Past His Anti-Semitism
When the conductor Semyon Bychkov arrived at a Russian-style cafe in midtown Manhattan to discuss the upcoming Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky festival at the New York Philharmonic, I handed the conductor a one-page document I’d found that morning that had unveiled a new Tchaikovsky for me. It summarized two boxes at the Columbia University Rare Book…
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The New York Jewish Film Festival, Jewish Women March, and More to Read, Watch, and Do This Weekend
If you require weekend plans, political and otherwise, the Forward has you covered. For new reads, look to Peter Hayes’ “Why? Explaining the Holocaust,” released this week, and Joseph Kertes’ novel of war and escape, released last week, “The Afterlife of Stars.” For lighter, faster reads, check out The New York Times Magazine’s profile of…
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How the Granddaughter of a Borscht Belt Waiter Became Roberta Peters, Opera Star
The enduring career of the American Jewish soprano Roberta Peters, who died on January 18 at age 86, shows that while not absolutely necessary, it helped if an opera singer’s grandfather was headwaiter at Grossinger’s in the Catskills. This Borscht Belt notability, father of Ruth Hirsch, a milliner, who had married Sol Peterman, a shoe…
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