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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Defying Gravity WIth Marc and Bella Chagall
Theater director Emma Rice excused herself for being rather emotional. Her cast had just completed its first run-through of “The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk,” and she said the experience had left her slightly at a loss for words. “I’m sort of in love with it at the moment,” she said, laughing, “so I have no…
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Remembering Scientist Simon Ramo — Oldest Man To Ever Receive a Patent
The American physicist, engineer, and entrepreneur Simon Ramo, who died on June 27 at the age of 103, drew lifelong inspiration from music and sports for his widespread achievements. Remembered for his pioneering work in microwave and missile technology and often called the father of the Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Ramo co-created two Fortune 500…
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Calvin Trillin Talks Jokes, Journalism — and Judaism
(JTA) — Writer Calvin Trillin may be most famous today for his humorous musings on food, family, travel and love. But before he won the Thurber Prize for Humor in 2013; before “Uncivil Liberties,” his humor column for The Nation — he has lovingly called it “a pinko magazine published on cheap paper” where he…
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How Strat-O-Matic Baseball Changed My Life Forever
On a warm afternoon in the autumn of 1976, my friend Jonathan took me up to his family’s dusty attic playroom and introduced me to something that would change my life forever. No, it wasn’t my first puff of weed, my first look at National Lampoon (or Hustler), or even my first listen to the…
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Remembering Michael Herr, Unparalleled Chronicler of Vietnam
In “First Kill,” a 2001 Dutch documentary film, Michael Herr, who died on June 23 at age 76, reflected on his unlikely fame as author of the novelized memoir “Dispatches” and co-screenwriter of the films “Full Metal Jacket” and “Apocalypse Now,” all about the Vietnam War: “I’m a nice middle class Jewish boy. I’m not…
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Meet Ahamed Weinberg: The Jewish-Muslim-Catholic Comedian
Growing up, Ahamed Weinberg had a one-of-a-kind answering machine message. It would leave some callers perplexed. “As-salamu alaykum, you’ve reached the Weinbergs!” Weinberg, now 26, is channeling his hybrid identity into comedy. The son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, both of whom converted to Islam in Philadelphia, he’s spent years explaining his…
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Why I’ll Never Live in England Again After Brexit
In September 1938, six weeks before Kristallnacht, my German Jewish grandfather, who had fought for his country in the First World War, left Berlin on one of the proverbial last trains out. After several years in New York and then Knoxville, he would eventually settle in Texas in 1943. In Berlin he had been a…
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Art How J.J. Tiziou Is Taking Over the National Museum
I nearly stepped on the tall, bearded man laying out pairs of big red headshots on the floor of a hallway in the offices of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It was J.J. Tiziou — who you might know best from the massive photographic installation of “How Philly Moves” between the…
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Seven Holocaust Memoirs You Must Read
The personal is political, but the personal is also a powerful tool to come to grips with historical events that tragically transcend individuals, families and even nations. The inexpressible loss of European Jewry in the Shoah has led many scholars and artists to address the phenomenon in a number of creative ways. With the help…
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Reconstructing a Child’s Life During the Holocaust
A History of the Grandparents I Never Had By Ivan Jablonka Stanford University Press, 352 pages, $30 Perhaps no moment in modern history has been written about as much as the Shoah. Historians and memoirists, in particular, have striven to re-create or retell this event. While the two genres are distinct, the dividing line between…
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Art Can You Tell a Shakespeare Play By Its Poster?
Against a red background, a featureless white head, lacking its crown, opens to reveal a set of white steps descending into a black cavern. A man in profile, the barest combination of ivory skin and black robe, stares down into the almost pleading sockets of a skull in his hands. A shining, simple crown hovers…
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