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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Should Baruch Spinoza Be Brought Back Into Jewish Fold — 350 Years Later?
(JTA) — More than 350 years after this city’s Portuguese Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza and banned his writings for eternity, the philosopher’s books are for sale at the souvenir shop of the community’s synagogue. Spinoza, a Dutch-born Jewish philosopher who laid the intellectual foundations of the Enlightenment and is sometimes referred to as history’s…
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Pierre Birnbaum on the ‘Israel-ization’ of French Jews
The French Jewish political sociologist and historian Pierre Birnbaum, born in 1940, is an emeritus professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. His books include ; “Jewish Destinies”; and “The Idea of France” and “Two Houses: Essay on the Citizenship of Jews (in France and the USA)” His most recent work, “The Confusions of a Government Jester,” applies…
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Poland Looks to Hollywood To Transform Wartime Image (and Shift Holocaust Narrative)
WARSAW — Poland’s new conservative rulers think their country faces an image problem abroad and they want Hollywood to produce a Polish equivalent of “Braveheart” or “Pearl Harbor” to promote their country’s positive place in history. They also are looking to alter the narrative when it comes to Poland, where most of the Nazi death…
The Latest
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The Fight to Reclaim Islam
Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue By Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz Harvard University Press, 144 pages, $17.95 In a controversial address last year, President Obama made clear that the Islamic State is “not Islamic.” “No religion,” he explained, “condones the killing of innocents.” By declaring the Islamic State group to be an…
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Be a Mensch
For about four years, I was a dedicated student in a yeshiva that eventually became a vacuum cleaner repair shop. Like many of my peers growing up in a Modern Orthodox neighborhood on Long Island, I went to a yeshiva in Israel after I graduated high school. That time was an unmitigated disaster; I spent…
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Carrie Brownstein Plays the ‘Hunger’ Games
Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl By Carrie Brownstein Riverhead Books, 256 pages, $27.95 The title of Carrie Brownstein’s recently released memoir, “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl,” comes, as any Sleater-Kinney fan will giddily tell you, from one of the songs on her band’s album “The Woods” (which was released shortly before the group’s…
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Classic Yiddish Operetta ‘The Golden Bride’ Revived for a New Generation
(JTA) – “For a German Jew, Yiddish is beneath contempt,” musicologist Michael Ochs told JTA. “German Jews tend to think of Yiddish as bad German. The only use we had in our family for it was to make fun of it.” So it is more than a tad ironic that it was Ochs, whose family…
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Meet The Schlep Sisters, the Jewish Ladies of Burlesque
It’s early on a Saturday evening and I’m following Minnie Tonka and Darlinda Just Darlinda, hereafter known as the burlesque duo The Schlep Sisters, through the streets of downtown Brooklyn. We make our way to Mark Morris Dance Center, where Darlinda promptly plunks a blinged out menorah down onto the table. Gold stilettos are whipped…
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The Jews of Al-Jazeera
Broadcasting icon Dave Marash is all too familiar with the label “self-hating Jew,” and it’s a phrase he holds in the deepest contempt. “I’m not a pious or practicing Jew, but I’ve always identified myself as Jewish,” he said during a phone interview from his home in New Mexico. “My humor is Jewish — very…
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Books Barack Obama’s Favorite Book of 2015 is by Lauren Groff
'Fates and Furies' gets his stamp of approval
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Music Why Do So Many Grammy Nominees Have Jewish Grannies?
Bob Dylan has a funny history with the Grammy Awards. He didn’t win a single Grammy for any of his truly groundbreaking and most amazing work in the 1960s – the songs that everyone thinks of when you say “Bob Dylan” – nor for his mid-1970s triumph, his comeback album “Blood on the Tracks.” It…
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
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