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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Marshal Petain’s Jewish Speechwriter
The French Jewish author Henri Raczymow, born in 1948, has written books combining a fascination with family, literature, and history. From “Heinz,” about his uncle who was murdered at Majdanek concentration camp, to “Swan’s Way,” about Marcel Proust’s character Charles Swann, Raczymow offers personal insights into expressions of Judaism. His latest book, “Emmanuel Berl’s Melancholy”…
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The 10 Most Jewish Beatles Songs Now on iTunes and Spotify
By now you’ve all heard that after years of holding out, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono have struck deals with major music streaming services including Spotify and Apple Music, and have allowed the complete Beatles catalog to be available to those who stream music online. Both Spotify and Apple allow users to create playlists of…
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They Were the Good Kids on the Lower East Side
The three alter kockers looked much younger than their years when they greeted each other at the Seward Park Library on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Mentally sharp, with considerable color in their skin and dyed hair, they seemed giddy that they’d been chosen to be the first formal interview subjects for The New York Public…
The Latest
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Books Protecting Anne Frank’s Voice — Even 7 Decades Later
When Anne Frank wrote in her diary to pass the time, she probably never even thought about copyright law or the sticky question of who would come to own her words. She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 15, but her father Otto survived and eventually was persuaded to…
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The 8 Best Jewish Graphic Novels of 2015, From Ayn Rand to Orthodox Babysitters
It’s never too late to jump on the comic books wagon, or as some call them: graphic novels. We definitely know they’re not just for kids anymore, after Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer and all that. Reading comics makes you look cooler, smarter and younger: it’s a fact (ok, it’s not, but don’t blame me…
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Israel Bans Novel About Mixed Romance From Classrooms
Israel’s Education Ministry has ruled against the inclusion of a novel about a romance between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man in the Hebrew high school curriculum because it feared it could raise tensions among pupils, an official said on Thursday. Israeli media said some teachers requested Dorit Rabinyan’s novel, “Borderlife,” be included in…
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New French History Offers a Ray of Hope for Jewish-Muslim Relations
The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims From North Africa to France By Ethan B. Katz Harvard University Press 480 pages, $35 In August 1961, two Algerian Jews, Simon Zouaghi and Martin Benisti, disembarked in Marseilles. The two men — one a butcher, the other a cook — had uprooted themselves and their loved ones…
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He Dreamed a Dream in Yiddish
Over the weekend, two events encapsulated Yiddish New York, the week-long festival of Yiddish arts, music and culture that served to replace a gaping hole in the calendar left by the demise of KlezKamp, which ended its 30-year run last year at this time. On Saturday night at the Museum of Jewish Heritage at Battery…
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PHOTOS: The Last Jews of ‘The Fiddler’s’ Shtetl
With Fiddler on the Roof opening on Broadway to rave reviews, we republish an article Edward Serotta wrote for the German newspaper Die Zeit on January 8, 1998, after he stumbled upon the former shtetl where Sholem Aleichem first started writing. None of those mentioned in this article are still living, or remain in Bogoslav…
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Film & TV How Haskell Wexler Became the Epitome of Cool
Haskell Wexler had a deep knack for the cool — how else to achieve fame as a cinematographer? Name another — go on, I dare you. In a town that worships “the talent” over actual technical talent, Wexler’s work behind the camera stood out in Hollywood. And, even rarer, the man stood for something; he…
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How Debbie Reynolds Became the Perfect Jewish Mother
The witty, multitalented performer Debbie Reynolds, who died on December 28 at age 84, surprisingly found herself associated with Judaism both on- and off-screen. From celebrity notoriety as the decidedly non-Jewish spouse of Jewish singer Eddie Fisher, Reynolds survived her marriage’s breakup and went on be cast onscreen as Jewish or crypto-Jewish mothers in later…
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