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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Why ‘Weiner!’ Documentary Brings Back Memories of Ed Koch
Populism comes in many shades. A global current of simmering anger and resentment, manifested most alarmingly on Friday in the UK, continues to buoy race-baiting demagogues. “Weiner,” the new Anthony Weiner documentary, while stunning in its sensational front-row view of the former congressman and mayoral candidate’s implosion, provides a portrait of another brand of the…
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How Many Neighbors Were Complicit in the Holocaust?
Facing deportation to Auschwitz, 13-year-old Steven Fenves watched as neighbors in Hungarian-occupied Yugoslavia lined the stairs, “waiting to ransack whatever we left behind, cursing at us, yelling at us, spitting at us as we left.” Choking up, he also recalled in an oral history that the family’s cook rushed into the apartment to salvage artwork…
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Agata Tuszyńska Knew She Was Jewish But Couldn’t Talk About It
A Family History of Fear By Agata Tuszyńska Translated by Charles Ruas Knopf, 400 pages, $27.95 ‘Truth is safer, always.” The Polish poet, biographer, and memoirist Agata Tuszyńska sat across from me in the living room of an expensively furnished apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, drinking black tea. It was a warm Monday morning,…
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Ben Ehrenreich Throws Stones at Conventional Wisdom About Israel
In the classic American film noir “Out of the Past,” the wayward mob mistress and the private eye hired to drag her back home are, inevitably, flirting in a casino in Mexico. “Is there a way to win,” she asks, sultry and musical, pretending that she’s talking about the gambling tables. “No,” the doomed chump…
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Meet Donald Trump’s Jewish Architect Who’s Now Helping Hillary Clinton
Between the lawsuit against Donald Trump’s eponymous “university,” reports that his performance as a real estate investor has been markedly subpar in comparison to that of his peers, and the bankruptcies declared by four of his hotels and casinos, the presidential candidate’s reputation as a businessman isn’t exactly intact. In a newly-released campaign video, Hillary…
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Elie Wiesel Recalls The Friends He Used To Have
Editor’s note: “My Friends” (“Mayne khaveyrim”) by Elie Wiesel was published in the Forverts on February 21, 1966. At that time Wiesel was a staff correspondent for the newspaper, contributing news articles, book reviews and political commentary, as well as memoiristic pieces and personal essays. In “My Friends” he recalled his youth growing up in…
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Remembering the Iranian Film Master With a Devoted Israeli Following
The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who died on July 4 at age 76, trod a fine line as a humanist director living in an Islamic Republic that is committed to destroying the state of Israel. By contrast, his pacific, abstract, philosophical, deliberately-paced creations featured people driving through traffic jams, up difficult inclines, and past natural…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Duped Into Enlisting “Capitalist patriotism isn’t worth a penny,” a Forverts editorial reads. “The bosses themselves prove it.” After businessmen sent their workers to protect the country in the wake of a skirmish on the Mexican border, employees were told that since their bosses stood in such strong support of their…
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How Philip Roth Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump
A candidate galvanizes a weakened and divided Republican Party. He’s a celebrity, a charismatic outsider with no political experience, and his racist rhetoric does nothing to halt his momentum. As Philip Roth wrote, “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.” Am I the only one who — just a week ago — pulled Roth’s…
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The Talmudic Argument For a More Ethical Financial System
It takes some chutzpah to write a book that takes on the whole financial system, let alone a plan to fix it. But that’s the task my co-authors and I undertook in writing “What They Do With Your Money.” Why? Consider that Talmudic tradition tells us that the first question you are asked in making…
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Unmasking the Invisible Jews of Budapest
To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Clothes make the man. Invisible people have little or no influence on society.” Yet Hungarian Jews, because they assimilated into society to the point that most overt Jewish qualities vanished, made a significant cultural impact. This is one thesis of a new book, “The Invisible Jewish Budapest”. Its author, Mary Gluck,…
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