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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That Time My Father Met Albert Einstein
Around the end of the 1940s, Albert Einstein needed surgery and decided to have it done at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. My family used Brooklyn Jewish because my father’s older brother Will was attending physician in Ob/Gyn there. He delivered me and my sister there. My father was there for a hemorrhoidectomy. In those days, hospitals…
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Chicago Mercantile Exchange Chair Leo Melamed Stars in His Son’s Movie
CHICAGO — For many years, the name Leo Melamed has been virtually synonymous with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Melamed first ventured onto the trading floor in the 1950s as a law student working as a runner. The CME, when Melamed joined it, operated under the open outcry system of traders and brokers communicating through shouts…
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In Berlin, A Remembrance of Synagogues Past
How do you take a walk down memory lane if you don’t have any memories of your own? That’s what I was asking myself on September 11 of this year, when the United States was commemorating the 15th anniversary of a great domestic tragedy and I was in Berlin, participating in yet another attempt to…
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Why Sukkot Is the Most Magical Holiday of All
‘I can’t wait for Sukkot.” An expression of anticipatory excitement coming from a fellow member of my temple? Our rabbi? My Orthodox cousins? It was the 13-year-old son of our non-Jewish neighbors. And another piece of evidence of a remarkable phenomenon our family has discovered about the holiday: That it is magic. No, it’s not…
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WATCH: Steven Sondheim Revisits One of His Most Brilliant Failures
One of the highlights of the recent New York Film Festival was the premiere of Lonny Price’s documentary “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened,” which goes behind the scenes of one of Broadway’s most legendary failures, “Merrily We Roll Along,” directed by Harold Prince with a score by Steven Sondheim. Though Sondheim’s score…
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Why the Tallit Is Making a Comeback
Funny how it takes a kerfuffle to get people thinking about what they wear, especially within the precincts of the sanctuary. In the wake of Donald Trump’s donning a prayer shawl, or tallit, while visiting an African-American church in September, I, like many of you, took to the Internet to learn more. Was the wearing…
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Did Radical Politics Undercut the Work of This Brilliant Photographer?
Louis Stettner, the American Jewish photographer who died on October 13 at age 93, produced images governed by Socialist ideals to the point where a full understanding of his creative personality requires looking at his works in other media. After early inspiration to take up photography by encounters with such talents as Alfred Steiglitz and…
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In a Catholic Town, a Tribute and Reunion For Poland’s Jews
I came to Poland for the opening of a new Jewish museum in Czestochowa, and found myself participating in a four-day “reunion,” as it was called, though most of the 125 participants seemed to be meeting for the first time. They were, almost all of them, Jews from Israel, the U.S., and other countries whose…
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Why Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan Has a Yiddish Soul
It was not two days ago that I was making a point in a private e-mail in which I reached for this example from the pen of the newest Nobel Laureate for Literature: “Time and love has branded me with its claws/Had to go to Florida/Dodging them Georgia laws/Poor Boy in a hotel called The…
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What Did Alan Greenspan ‘Know’?
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Alan Greenspan has been many things to many people. In monetary policy, he was the patron saint of central bankers or a sinner who brought about the global financial crisis, depending who made the assessment and when. In life, he was a…
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Yes, Bob Dylan Writes Literature. Next Question?
Bob Dylan’s been a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature for many years, but I don’t think any of us really thought he’d ever win. Now that he has, the question remains, what’s left? He’s already won all the other awards – medals of honor and freedom from the American and French governments,…
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