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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Bernie Madoff’s Juicy Scandal Turns Into Worst TV Snoozefest Ever
When a middle-aged sexpot with a Long Island accent introduces herself to Bernie Madoff outside the bathroom at Elie Wiesel’s house, one hour into ABC’s four-hour based-on-a-true-story miniseries, it marks first time in the history of network television that the phrase “CFO of Hadassah” has been employed as a pickup line. “Sheryl Weinstein, CFO of…
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Rabbis Get Into Super Bowl Trash Talking With ‘Mitzvah Bowl’
Two reform rabbis have started their own Super Bowl rivalry in the name of tzedakah, complete with amped-up videos and friendly taunting like calling the Panthers the Kitty Cats. Rabbi Judith Schindler of Temple Beth El in Charlotte, North Carolina and Rabbi Joe Black at Temple Emanuel in Denver, Colorado have set up a joint…
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How a 96-Year-Old Limerick Master Became a New York Times Top Commenter
In a dim third-floor apartment on East 88th Street in Manhattan, strewn with potted plants, unopened mail and bronze statuettes, 96-year-old Larry Eisenberg writes limericks on the MacBook Air his children bought him and posts them in the comments sections on The New York Times’ website. Sometimes he can be politically pointed and sassy, showing…
The Latest
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Film & TV How a Holocaust Film Earned Jacques Rivette’s Deepest Contempt
With the death last week of Jacques Rivette, a certain idea of French cinema took one step closer to death. Along with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, Rivette was one of the enfants terribles of the so-called Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. Rebelling against the reign of studios and what they scorned as…
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A Jewish Call To Right Wrongful Convictions
The first time Judaism and wrongful convictions collided for New York Post crime reporter Reuven Fenton was in 2013, when he covered a hearing in which a Brooklyn judge freed David Ranta, wrongfully convicted for murdering esteemed Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger 22 years earlier. The made-for-tabloid story sparked an investigation into egregious official misconduct by the…
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Why We Need a New Saul Bellow…and Many Other New Things
‘Surely one of the healthier ironies of the United States is that its finest postwar novelist was an illegal immigrant from Canada. I realize that in pointing this out I risk stoking the moronic inferno of this season’s national seekers of high office, but also, more seriously, of mischaracterizing Saul Bellow’s genius.” —Why We Need…
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Learning To Build A Business In ‘One Month’
The offices of One Month, Mattan Griffel’s startup in SoHo, are the first I’ve ever seen that have a wine fridge en suite. They also feature a fridge stocked with kombucha, and a pillow adorned with a smiling image of Griffel and his One Month co-founder, Chris Castiglione. When Griffel met me at the office…
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Scholars Are Finally Tackling Yiddish Children’s Literature
In the 1921 Yiddish children’s book “The Wind That Got Angry,” by Moyshe Kulbak, an “old, wandering wind” finds himself booted out of his village when a thaw sets in. He tries to find somewhere in the woods to rest. He’s tired and wants to sleep, but no one wants him around. The oak tree…
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Why We Want Our Plantings To Be Like Us
‘They say you’re smart,” my friend Chavi emailed me a couple weeks ago, “ “so solve my problem, please.” I wanted to hear more about the unnamed “they” — we could be friends, I was sure — but Chavi’s dilemma was pressing. A former ultra-Orthodox woman, Chavi is now the mother of two young children,…
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The Secret Identity in My Spam Folder
Appearances, as we all know, can be deceiving. If you looked at me, you’d see an oldish, unprepossessing, rather dull fellow dedicated to his daughters and his work, and anything but a master of the universe. But that is not the whole story. There is, alas, another me, tucked away out of sight. This other…
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How I Found Myself Living Out a 1980s Video Game
In 1984, my time was mostly divided among school, preparing for my bar mitzvah and playing Castle Wolfenstein on my family’s Apple II+. Castle Wolfenstein was a game about a prisoner escaping from a Nazi bunker. The bunker is labyrinthine, with multiple levels. I knew every inch of it. Everywhere there were guards, but they…
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