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 Forgotten Gizmo That Brought Us Closer to the Holy Land
Some academics I know have been quick to avail themselves of the latest digital tools so that they might communicate more effectively with their tech-savvy students. Others are more apt to roll their eyes or dig in their heels at the prospect of actively integrating technology into their teaching. Hoping to convince the skeptics among…
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Canadian Klezmer Camp Will Pay Tribute to Sholem Aleichem
For twenty years, KlezKanada has offered a summertime retreat for musicians and music lovers in an idyllic setting in the Laurentian mountains at Camp B’nai Brith in Lantier, Quebec, an hour outside Montreal. In some ways, it has been the summer camp version of the now-defunct wintertime KlezKamp that took place for 30-some years in…
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Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel”
This month Anne reads: THE MAGIC BARREL (1958) By Bernard Malamud What could it mean, this strange story by Bernard Malamud? Who is he talking to, and what is he talking about? And do I care? Post sexual revolution, post feminism, at a time when too much assimilation, not too little, worries us, should we…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago New York City’s cloak makers have responded with a massive strike after bosses locked organizing workers out of their factories last week. When the clock struck 11 on a Wednesday morning, tens of thousands of cloak makers stood up, left their machines and walked out of their factories. With so many…
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Introducing Our New Column: ‘Reading With Roiphe’
Everyone says we are The People of the Book. This is true enough, and rather comforting, but we are also The People of the story. From the beginning we have told tales, short tales, of what is and what was and who hated whom and why, who loved whom when perhaps they shouldn’t. (Oh, poor…
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So Why On That Night of All Other Nights Do We Eat Those Fruit Jelly Slices?
As I gazed at the Passover aisle in the supermarket, a scene from “Apollo 13” flashed before my eyes. Tom Hanks and his crew are stranded above the moon with a rapidly depleting supply of oxygen and no possibility of resupply or rescue. If the astronauts are going to fix their ship, they will have…
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How I Honored My Grandfather’s Memory — With a 20-Square-Foot Model of Auschwitz
It was August 1944 when the last trains rolled out of Radogoszcz station from the Łódź ghetto. The trains were headed for Auschwitz, and my great-grandfather Edward (Yehuda) Biderman was on one of these ill-fated transports. He had suffered so much already. Born into poverty on October 3, 1911, in Poland, he dropped out of…
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Mystery Pre-Holocaust Photo Trove Depicts Family of Yiddish Scholar Ruth Wisse
(JTA) — When documentary photographer Richard Schofield stumbled upon a trove of unidentified prewar photographs in September 2013 in the storage room of the Sugihara House museum in Kaunas, Lithuania, he knew he had found something special. The photos, dating from about 1910 through 1940, were from a Lithuanian Jewish family’s album that had been…
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Meet the Jewish Designers Who Clothed Cinderella and Indiana Jones
For the first time in its more than 175-year history, the Jewish owned, London based costumier, Angels Costumes, received an official honor when it was awarded the BAFTA award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema in February. Founded in 1840, the family-run company is the world’s largest supplier of costumes to the stage and screen….
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The Surprising Yiddishkeit of Nat King Cole
In 1947, a magnificent jazz pianist and singer named Nat King Cole recorded a breakthrough number titled “Nature Boy.” In a world of late-era swing, novelty songs, and syrupy ballads, “Nature Boy” stood out because of mysterious, evocative lyrics but also because of its brooding, urgent melody. Few listeners were aware of the Jewish resonances…
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Library of America Founder Daniel Aaron Dies at 103
The Chicago-born American Jewish literary historian Daniel Aaron, who died on April 30 at the age of 103, combined stamina and longevity with an implicit belief in humanity’s moral evolution. Aaron’s “Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism,” published by Columbia University Press (1961), discussed such notables as Mike Gold (born Itzok Isaac…
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