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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Why Anti-Semitic Propaganda Seems Oddly Relevant Today
Given the vitriolic speech surrounding the current presidential campaign, the “Anti-Semitism 1919-1939” exhibit at The New York Historical Society that opened April 11, seems ominously well timed. “You can’t accept this as a fringe area,” said Kenneth Rendell, the founder and director of The Museum of World War II in Boston, who curated the exhibit,…
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Something’s Missing From Edgar Bronfman’s Book on Judaism
Why Be Jewish? A Testament By Edgar M. Bronfman Twelve Books, 256 pages, $26 Edgar M. Bronfman found his Judaism late in his life, and embraced it as if he were making up for lost time. As he aged, he learned more and did more, developing a personal rationale for his beliefs and behaviors, and…
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What Ever Became of the ‘Children of Jerusalem’?
Between 1991 and 1996, seven Israeli and Palestinian children starred in a Canadian documentary series about life in Jerusalem. Though they grew up within miles of one another, they lived worlds apart, never to meet. A quarter-century later, I set out to find them. I learned about the obscure series, called “Children of Jerusalem,” from…
The Latest
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What You Shouldn’t Expect When You’re Expecting (and Jewish)
The 20-week ultrasound, the one where you get to see the most detailed image yet of your baby-to-be, is, for many, a time of exquisite exhilaration and wonder at the feat of physics that can capture the contours of your roughly 9-ounce bundle of joy. But as I lay on the table, watching brain quadrants…
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Art At the Jewish Museum’s Mizrahi Exhibit, a Missed Opportunity
Many years ago, my colleague Maurice Berger and I proposed an exhibition on fashion and the Jews to the powers-that-be at the Jewish Museum. Nothing came of it, save countless meetings and drafts and redrafts of our proposal. The project was shelved. I was delighted, then, to learn of “Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History,” an…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Defense lawyers for Manhattan Lower East Side resident Abraham Rotman called for a retrial after the jury found the defendant guilty of murdering Saul Jacobs by stabbing him on the corner of Eldridge and Stanton streets. Rotman, who was walking with a woman on Stanton Street when the murder took place,…
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When a Holocaust Memoir Becomes a Ghost Story
But You Did Not Come Back: A Memoir By Marceline Loridan-Ivens Translated by Sandra Smith Atlantic Monthly Press, 112 pages, $22 In 2015, more than 7,000 French Jews immigrated to Israel. A Jewish agency think tank began planning for 120,000 more, roughly a quarter of all the Jews in France. Jewish schoolchildren increasingly cannot attend…
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Film & TV After All These Years, Are These Movies Still Funny?
The first time I remember being overwhelmed with laughter in a movie theater was when Peter Sellers, as Inspector Jacques Clouseau in “The Return of the Pink Panther,” went airborne with a slow-motion karate kick that sailed over the head of sidekick Cato (Burt Kwouk), through a door and into the mayhem of crashing shelves…
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How a Suicidal Dog Led a Writer to a Nobel Prize
Pedigree By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 144 Pages, $25 After the Circus By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 216 pages, $16 Paris Nocturne By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 160 pages, $16 In his recollection of his first 21 years, the Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano writes that, apart from his younger brother, Rudy,…
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The Secret Jewish History of Nostradamus
This July 2 will mark the 450th anniversary of the death of Nostradamus (1503–1566), the French apothecary and supposed seer of Jewish origin. Born Michel de Nostredame in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, his most famous work was “The Prophecies,” a collection of four-line texts that purported to tell the future. A recent translation by Richard Sieburth reminds…
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How Richard Linklater’s ‘Everybody Wants Some’ Celebrates Bullying
Because I live in Austin, it’s hard to have perspective on a Richard Linklater movie. Linklater occupies a position in the cultural hierarchy here only slightly behind Willie Nelson. Every time he releases a film, it gets celebrated like a civic holiday. So when I say something like, “I enjoyed “Boyhood” pretty well but I…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Fast Forward Elected PA Jewish judge leaves Democratic party, citing ‘disturbingly common’ antisemitism
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Fast Forward Israeli report on ‘systematic’ Oct. 7 sexual violence seeks to shift debate from denial to accountability
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