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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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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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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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…
The Latest
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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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Six Failed Messiahs From Jewish History
Ever since Jesus came along in the first century of the common era, claiming to be the son of God and the messiah, there have been a lot of copycats. Messiah claimants have arisen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and have come from every corner of the world touched by the Abrahamic faiths. Sabbatai Zevi…
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How Helen Gurley Brown Turned Herself Into a Cultural Icon
Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown By Gerri Hirshey Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pages, $27 She told one girlfriend that she had slept with 178 men before her marriage. Even afterward, she never stopped having discreet affairs, using another friend’s apartment for assignations. Raised in poverty and insecure…
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No Redemption For Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ in Bayreuth
If I needed to choose my favorite incongruous moment from Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s spectacularly bad production of “Parsifal,” which opened this year’s Bayreuth Festival, I would choose the shukling, or davening, Jews in tzitzit and yarmulkes, who appear in the third act chorus. Titurel, the ancient leader of the Knights of the Grail, has just…
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The Time When Hitler Blinked
Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany By Nathan Stoltzfus Yale University Press, 432 pages, $40 In late February and early March 1943, “Aryan” spouses in mixed marriages, primarily women, gathered in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse to demand the release of their Jewish husbands from detention. After threatening to shoot the protesters, the Third Reich unexpectedly…
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Here’s How One Man Has Preserved the Milestones of Jewish History
Jerry Klinger’s epiphany came as he stood on a corner in Las Vegas, New Mexico. He was looking for Temple Montefiore, the first Jewish house of worship in the state, dating to 1884. All he could find was a building the Catholic Church used. Turned out that Klinger was in the right place and had…
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After the Holocaust, A Jewish State in Saxony
Judenstaat By Simone Zelitch Tor Books, 320 pages, $12.99 Counterfactual history has never been more popular in American culture. The success of Amazon Prime’s recent hit series “The Man in the High Castle” (based on Philip K. Dick’s famous novel about the Nazis winning World War II) and the Hulu series “11.22.63” (based on Stephen…
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Remembering Seymour Papert: Revolutionary Socialist and Father of A.I.
The South African Jewish computer scientist and educator Seymour Papert, who died on July 31 at age 88, was a long-time fixture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He pioneered artificial intelligence and co-invented the Logo programming language. Yet his work as a social reformer, rather than with machines per se, was a primordial obsession….
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish אַ בריוועלע דער מאַמען (זכרונות)A letter to my mother (memoirs)
בעת דער מחבר איז געלעגן אין אַ סאָוועטישן מיליטערישן שפּיטאָל האָט זײַן מאַמע זיך פֿאַרמאָסטן קעגן דעם אַסימילירטן ייִדישן הויפּט־דאָקטער
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Fast Forward 2 men found guilty in UK of plotting Islamic State-inspired antisemitic terror attack
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Fast Forward Self-appointed chief rabbi of Saudi Arabia says he was denied entry at border
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Fast Forward Coast Guard again retracts policy that would downgrade swastika as hate symbol, clearing path for new leader’s confirmation
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