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 Lewisohn Sisters Put the Ooomph in Do-Gooding
Manhattan’s Lower East Side of yesteryear conjures up images of dense and inhospitable streets filled with immigrants determined to get on with the business of becoming American, as well as with social reformers equally determined to accelerate that process. Though well intentioned and good hearted, these reformers, we’re apt to think, were often tone deaf…
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Art Can the Museum of Jewish Heritage Survive?
The Museum of Jewish Heritage is located at the tip of Manhattan, in Battery Park, nestled beside a quaint garden with panoramic views of the Statue of Liberty. Offering three floors of teachings on Jewish life, with objects culled over the past century, the museum aims to educate viewers about Jewish life before, during and…
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Remembering Thomas Toivi Blatt, Survivor of Sobibor
Can we grieve for a man we don’t know? If he was a holocaust survivor who was part of a group that led a revolt and escaped from Sobibor we might. If he was someone who reminded of us of our grandfather, our father, people we knew throughout our lives, we might. If he were…
The Latest
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Books The ‘Fat Jew’ Talks ‘Mutant’ Millennials and Going to the Strip Club After His Bar Mitzvah
Does this really surprise anyone? The week his first hardcover paper book comes out, “The Fat Jew” is declaring social media, where he has 6.5 million Instagram followers, to be . “I was very much born out of the Internet,” the funnyman (real name the Josh Ostrovsky) tells The Telegraph. “But my feeling is that…
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Music Excavating Lost Pre-War Klezmer Recordings
Ever since the beginning of the klezmer revival in the 1970s, music critics and musicians have wondered just how close to its European roots the music they were performing is. The musicians of the 1970s had access to only two sources from which to learn: the few still-living musicians, such as clarinetist Dave Tarras, and…
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How I Rid Myself of the Evil Eye
‘You came just in time!” Aidel Miller said when I walked into her home in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. Wearing a polka dot shirt and a long black skirt, she was standing over a woman draped in a beige blanket. The woman peeked out shyly and tucked her head back in….
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Martin Duberman’s Radical 85-Year Journey Through White America
‘The older I get, the more radical I get.” So says Martin Duberman, the strikingly youthful-looking 85-year-old author, activist, CUNY professor emeritus and playwright, whose groundbreaking civil rights drama “In White America” is being remounted — with some revisions — on its 50th anniversary. “Like all political theater, it’s a call to action,” Duberman says….
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Your Jewish Nose Job Stories
In , published in the Forward last month, Naomi Zeveloff described the evolution of the procedure once considered a rite of passage for Jewish American teenage girls. **In the 1950s and ’60s, nose jobs were seen as a way to fit in. For the price of minor surgery, you could erase the main visible trace…
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Me and Patti Smith and Andy Warhol and 1970’s New York and Me
I remember New York in the 1970s. We were just kids. The city was on fire and we listened to vinyl. We lived in the Chelsea Hotel, all of us: me, Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Ultra Violet, Shel Silverstein, Margot Kidder, Richard Pryor, Bianca Jagger, Roger Angell, Joey Ramone, Debbie Harry, George Plimpton…
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How a Jewish Woman and a Kenyan Man Are Trying To Save the World Together
‘It’s powerful to share a dream together,” Jessica Posner said, holding hands loosely with her husband, Kennedy Odede. The couple are the co-founders of Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO). It’s a not-for-profit organization that provides social services in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum. Located in Nairobi, Kibera is home to hundreds of thousands of people, the…
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Mitzvah Accomplished
A few Octobers ago, I found myself in TriBeCa, ambling down Hudson Street. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I’d just gotten back from a three-day visit with my parents for Sukkot. Up ahead, I spotted two Lubavitcher teenagers, smiling and eager, green lulavim gripped in their fists like Jedi swords. I slowed and squinted…
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