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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The Forward Building: From Labor Citadel to Luxury Condos
At the corner of East Broadway and Canal, in the heart of Manhattan’s now chic Lower East Side, young men and women lined up on a recent Saturday night, waiting patiently to be seated at Mission Chinese Food, a downtown fixture decorated with a bright red awning and thick curtains. With faces turned to the…
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Molly Crabapple Explains How You Can Be an Artist and an Activist
Walking into artist and author Molly Crabapple’s apartment in New York City’s Financial District, I briefly thought I’d wandered into a painting I once studied in art history: David Teniers’ “Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in His Gallery.” The painting’s nominal focus is a group of men, archduke included, but they almost disappear beneath the riot of…
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We Were Aliens in Egypt — and I Still Am Today
The first time I felt a pressing need to visit a synagogue after officially discarding religious observance was less than a year later, in September 2008, while passing through Nashville, Tennessee. My friend Mordy and I had set out on a road trip several days earlier, in anticipation of the first High Holy Day season…
The Latest
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Film & TV ‘Wedding Doll’ Is Israeli Romance With No Hollywood Ending In Sight
In the 1993 movie “Benny and Joon,” Sam (Johnny Depp), a strange and illiterate young man, falls in love with Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson), an artistic young woman who suffers from occasional psychotic episodes. Aside from the odd breakdown, though, you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with her. As Sam says to Joon’s brother…
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Art How Berlin Laid Groundwork for Holocaust With Theft of Jewish Property
When Dr. Joanne Intrator’s father, Gerhard Intrator, was dying, he had one wish: that his daughter fight for the property the family had been forced to abandon when they fled the Nazis. True to her word, Intrator, a psychiatrist based on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, set out for Germany to lay claim to the buildings…
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What Arnold Wesker Talked About When He Talked About Jerusalem
Arnold Wesker, the British Jewish playwright who died on April 12 at age 83, might have been the most ardent explorer of the kibbutz ethos in English theatrical history. In his explicitly back-to-the-land play, “I’m Talking about Jerusalem” (1960), Ada Kahn, daughter of the Jewish family featured in an earlier play, “Chicken Soup with Barley,”…
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Bob Dylan’s Childhood Pal To Write Memoir
Louie Kemp, Bob Dylan’s childhood best friend who has maintained a close relationship with Dylan throughout their lives, will write “The Boys from the North Country: My Life with Robert Zimmerman and Bob Dylan,” for Random House, according to Publisher’s Marketplace. Author-musician Kinky Friedman, also a longtime Dylan friend and associate, will co-write the book…
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EXCLUSIVE: Listen to The Song Allen Ginsberg Wrote For His Father
Although the voice is definitely familiar, the genre is definitely not. Could that possibly be the late Allen Ginsberg, talk-singing while accompanied by horn and guitar? In fact, it is. In conjunction with the release of the 3 CD box set “The Last Word On First Blues” released by Omnivore Recordings, the Forward presents the…
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Why Anti-Semitic Propaganda Seems Oddly Relevant Today
Given the vitriolic speech surrounding the current presidential campaign, the “Anti-Semitism 1919-1939” exhibit at The New York Historical Society that opened April 11, seems ominously well timed. “You can’t accept this as a fringe area,” said Kenneth Rendell, the founder and director of The Museum of World War II in Boston, who curated the exhibit,…
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Something’s Missing From Edgar Bronfman’s Book on Judaism
Why Be Jewish? A Testament By Edgar M. Bronfman Twelve Books, 256 pages, $26 Edgar M. Bronfman found his Judaism late in his life, and embraced it as if he were making up for lost time. As he aged, he learned more and did more, developing a personal rationale for his beliefs and behaviors, and…
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What Ever Became of the ‘Children of Jerusalem’?
Between 1991 and 1996, seven Israeli and Palestinian children starred in a Canadian documentary series about life in Jerusalem. Though they grew up within miles of one another, they lived worlds apart, never to meet. A quarter-century later, I set out to find them. I learned about the obscure series, called “Children of Jerusalem,” from…
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