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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Art
Why Netanyahu Still Doesn’t Take Moshe Safdie’s Calls
Moshe Safdie was sitting in a wood-paneled room in the National Academy of Design’s Beaux-Arts mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, surrounded by his drawings and architectural models. Represented among the works by the septuagenarian architect in the exhibit “Global Citizen: The Art of Moshe Safdie” were materials related to some of his Israeli projects:…
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Resisting the Familiar Narrative of Resistance in France
How could anyone govern a country, Charles de Gaulle once asked, that has 240 different kinds of cheese? Less well known is the question he posed as leader of the Free French during World War II: How can anyone liberate a country that has nearly the same number of resistance movements? Okay, he didn’t really…
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David Gregory Meets His Faith
‘I don’t get this right all the time. Faith is hard. I do still get angry and hurt by it. But I aspire to do better. I’m not going to allow myself to be consumed by disappointment by how I left. This is a rough business.” The speaker is David Gregory, former moderator of “Meet…
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How the All-American Nose Job Got a Makeover
When Jaclyn Trop was thinking of getting a nose job at age 20, she sought counsel from her college professor. Her women’s studies class at Boston University had just finished a unit on cosmetic surgery — the professor had characterized the practice as “symptomatic of internal loathing,” Trop said — and Trop wondered if she…
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Art Gego Draws a Line at the Holocaust
The show currently on display at Dominique Lévy’s gallery on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and devoted to the works of the artist known as Gego, is called “Autobiography of a Line,” after an early art book made by Gego herself. The title suggests something deeply personal, but the show offers something more oblique, more obscurely…
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Our Lives With (and Without) Chantal Akerman
Sometime over last weekend, Chantal Akerman, the Belgian-French-Jewish filmmaker, committed suicide. Her body was found Monday. Her latest film, “No Home Movie,” a verité account of her mother’s decline and death, received its local premiere at the New York Film Festival this week in the immediate aftermath of Chantal’s own death. At the end of…
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Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize Is Tribute to Her Fight Against Anti-Semitic Belarus Tyrant
Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature October 8, is a banned author in her homeland of Belarus, as she explained in a 2013 interview with Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster. Her books are neither published nor discussed in the media there. Due to government persecution, she left Belarus from 2000 to…
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Life in the Nineties
When I was 89 I hid my age. But when I turned 90 it came as such a shock, I had to share my age with everyone. The number is awesome. Now I am 93. There are more than a million people in the world who have reached this age — but none in my…
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Was Henry Kissinger a Misunderstood Idealist?
There have been a lot of words used to describe Henry Kissinger, the first foreign-born secretary of state (Madeleine Albright was the second) whose family fled Nazi persecution for a better life in America. Idealist is hardly one of them for the man revered by some as a master negotiator and brilliant statesman and savaged…
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Film & TV Why Billy Wilder Called Jerry Lewis a Shmuck And Other Showbiz Tales
“How are you, Marty?” Jerry Lewis asked, sizing up his former director Martin Scorsese. “You’re not as tall as I thought you were.” His last words were clipped by a roomful of laughter, and the 89-year-old comedian, on hand for the Museum of the Moving Image and Comedy Hall of Fame discussion series “Iconic Characters…
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Film & TV How I Stole Chantal Akerman’s Ideas For the Obama White House
When I met Chantal Akerman, the famed film director whose alleged suicide was reported on October 6, I told her I was going to steal her shit. I didn’t blurt it out exactly like that, but having just seen her film “D’est” projected on a big beautiful screen at Cornell Cinema in 1995, I was…
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