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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Orly Castel-Bloom Scoops Always Controversial Sapir Prize
The judges for the Sapir Prize — widely considered to be Israel’s equivalent of the Man Booker prize — are not afraid of controversy. Last year, the award went to a Ruby Namdar’s “A Ruined House,” a novel written in Hebrew in New York, arousing such controversy that a rule was passed stating winners must…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Four Jewish men, all recent immigrants, were arrested and sent to prison for “blocking the sidewalk” on the corner of Bayard and Elizabeth streets. During their trial in the Tombs courtroom, the two policemen who arrested these “criminals” claimed that they had obstructed the sidewalk and passersby were blocked from crossing…
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Why I Can’t Stop Watching ‘Shtisel’
Ask anyone who has made aliyah to Israel, and they’ll tell you that it’s not always easy, even in peaceful times. As luck would have it, I moved to Jerusalem from California during a particularly challenging period. I arrived right before Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza broke out in the summer of 2014. Just…
The Latest
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London’s Hasidic Neighborhood Is Ready For Its Close-Up
There is a New York-based blog called “Hasid or Hipster” that juxtaposes the bushy beards and black hats of Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish population with those of the district’s hipsters and asks readers to guess which is which. Two utterly conflicting cultures divided — by all but a shared neighborhood and distinctive modes of dress. This…
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This Is Where Jewish American Art Began
While perhaps not a truth universally acknowledged, it is an outcome reasonably anticipated that if a museum holds opening-day festivities for a new exhibit on Valentine’s Day and the thermometer outside registers a cool 3 degrees, it is unlikely to attract many visitors. Not so for the Princeton Art Museum, which celebrated the opening of…
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How Martin Buber Lost Friends and Irritated People by Being a Happy Jew
Fifty years after his death in Jerusalem in 1965, Martin Buber, the Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher has “left an ambiguous impression,” as Walter Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem in 1936 about Buber’s appearance at a French philosophical gathering. Buber’s “I and Thou” about human relationships to people and things, is famously cited in Martin Luther…
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In Italian Comedy, Life Is Beautiful But Prejudice Is Hilarious
If most people wouldn’t consider rampant anti-Semitism to be a fertile or likely source of genuine cinematic hilarity, consider this: A few months back, Alberto Caviglia, a 31-year-old Italian Jew, won first prize for an Italian movie in the young director category of the Venice Film Festival for a mockumentary with just that subject matter:…
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Meet The Man Behind @BernieThoughts
Scrolling through the parody twitter account @BernieThoughts is a little bit like having an intimate one-on-one exchange with Bernie Sanders. Only instead of him griping about the middle class and the 1%, he’s debating suspicious-looking vegetables, the uselessness of belts and the fact that Italy probably needs to stick to just three types of pasta….
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Film & TV From Natalie Portman, a Tale of Amos Oz’s Childhood
In his 2002 autobiographical novel, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” the Israeli writer Amos Oz compares the process of remembering his childhood to the task of “trying to restore an ancient ruined building on the basis of seven or eight stones that are still left standing.” More than that: In his attempt to describe…
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Robert Klein Zips Through a Century of Jewish Show Tunes
From the sublime to the ridiculous, including many stops in between, “From Moses to Mostel: A History of the Jews (According to Musical Theatre),” given its world premiere at Town Hall on Saturday night and starring Robert Klein in a very Tevye-like role, succeeded in its simultaneous goals of recovering mostly forgotten or overlooked chestnuts…
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No Way
In a city of holiness and hell, in the land of Moloch, in an autumn spreading hatred like the latest fashion, hatred in which all fears float to the surface, all frustrations like backed-up sewage, there’s no way they won’t shoot the one who wants to murder, or the one they think wants to. Murder…
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