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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Remembering the Simple Life in Eastern Europe
This past March, three weeks before she passed away, my bubbe, Charlotte Friend, celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday. On that day, as on every other birthday she’d had over the last twenty or so years, she received several phone calls from her Russian friends — women (and a few men) to whom she had taught English…
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Forward Looking Back
1915 100 Years Ago Forty-eight-year-old fruit peddler Israel Ziftz was cutting coconuts when the knife he was using slipped and wound up going directly into his chest. Ziftz, who lives in East Harlem, realized he was in trouble, and so he went hastily to Beth Israel Medical Center, where doctors quickly grasped that, with a…
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How Amy Winehouse Risked Everything To Try To Change the World
Without the tattoos, Amy Winehouse was like the Jewish girl I kissed behind a plywood cutout of film actor Spencer Tracy as we walked back from a Saturday morning film show at the Gaumont Cinema along Albert Street, where I once lived in north London’s Camden Town district. This memory of my youth was one…
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How the World Came to an End 75 Years Ago
It was seventy-five years ago this week that the Jewish world of Eastern Europe came to an end. On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler’s armies, accompanied by Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak and Italian troops, attacked Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, along with the Baltics, which were then occupied by the Soviet Union, and Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. The…
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Director William Friedkin Finds His Jewish Connection
As I prepare to interview William Friedkin, I keep thinking about an assignment I had in high school. A much-loved high school history teacher asked us to write a term paper analyzing a classic European film alongside its American remake. The pairing I chose was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Wages of Fear” (1953) and Friedkin’s “Sorcerer” (1977)….
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LeBron James Has Changed Our Lives — but Not Our Cleveland Jewish Identity
After the Cleveland Cavaliers made history Sunday night, becoming the first basketball team in the history of the NBA Finals to come back from a 3-1 deficit and win a title against the arrogant, formerly untouchable Golden State Warriors, my wife asked me if the victory would be in any way hard to swallow, given…
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Why Roberto Burle Marx’s Art Is Still Too Big For Museums
Walking into the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit on Roberto Burle Marx, the Brazilian landscape architect best known for his strikingly patterned seaside pavements on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach, the first thing you’ll notice is the tapestry. At 87 feet long, it occupies the back wall of the main exhibition. It’s long, lean, abstract —…
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Film & TV What Germans and Jews Can Learn From ‘Germans and Jews’
“Germans and Jews,” an engaging, thoughtful documentary about the current relationship between Germany and its Jewish population, begins with a lively dinner party. In the middle of the meal, a German woman suddenly confesses that she always feels self-conscious uttering the words Juden and Deutschland and only dares to say them in English. It is…
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The Joan Rivers Collection Is Being Auctioned Off in Marie Antoinette Style
The items being auctioned off from Joan Rivers’ private collection at Christie’s are exactly what you would imagine anything belonging to Rivers to be: gaudy, entertaining, hilarious, ambitious. The comedian, known for her pointedly sharp style, died in 2014 at the age of 81. Now, more than 200 items from her Upper East Side apartment,…
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My Father Was the Greatest Champ of All Time
On the night of March 8th 1971, Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier for the heavyweight boxing championship at Madison Square Garden in what was billed as the Fight of the Century. My father, who I idealized when I was a boy, was an Ali fan. As an 8 year old at that time, my view…
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‘Tikkun’ Director Avishai Sivan Talks Breaking Taboos and Portraying the Orthodox
On Avishai Sivan’s website, the 39-year-old Israeli filmmaker has also posted almost two decades worth of the many rejection letters he’s received. It’s both a testimony to the extreme difficulty some institutions have had connecting with his provocative oeuvre and an impressive list of the most prestigious foundations and festivals in the world, including Cannes,…
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