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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Our Favorite Hanukkah Toy Was Actually a Non-Jewish Irish Gambling Game
With the arrival of Hanukkah comes the reemergence of dreidels from closets, drawers and cupboards. These tops are a beloved part of the holiday — but where did they actually come from? Like many things in Jewish history, the story that most of us heard about dreidels as children is entirely ahistorical. There were no…
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Remembering the Days of Vaudeville and Jewface
‘You had these performers who were making fun of Jews, but the interesting twist was that Jewish performers – really the first generation of Jewish immigrants born here – saw this material, and as they got involved in entertainment, they started to do it as well.” Eddy Portnoy, curator of the new exhibit “Jewface: Yiddish…
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The Jewish Secrets of Video Game Guru Ralph Baer
Jewish inventor Ralph H. Baer’s workshop desk isn’t exactly messy, but the 180 items on it represent the sort of organized chaos that cliché prescribes for brilliant minds. On a shelf sits his 1978 invention Simon, the iconic game with red, yellow, blue and green buttons that calls upon players to follow increasingly difficult sound…
The Latest
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Art The Life and Death and Life of Coney Island
Right now, on the bleeding edge of December, Coney Island is all over New York City. Just as the weather gets frosty and summer beach days recede from memory, the beach is suddenly everywhere. There’s a big exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum titled “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008,” which opened on November…
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A Famous MoMA Painting Makes Its Way Home — 80 Years Later
Before World War II, Max Fischer, a German journalist and political thinker, inherited a vast assortment of paintings from his parents. He initially thought the Nazi occupation would pass, but it became increasingly harder for him to find work because he was a “non-Aryan,” and his income was dwindling. A month after the Nuremberg Laws…
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Art Is This an Anti-Semitic Sculpture or a Rorschach Test?
For five years a sculpture constructed with steel letters stood in a Milwaukee suburb, gathering some attention but no controversy — that is, until a visiting blogger from New Jersey saw it and declared there were antt-Semitic slurs embedded in the artwork. The result was an Internet fury, which culminated in the work quickly being…
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Amir Gutfreund, Writer of Wit and Power, Dies of Cancer at 52
I first met Amir Gutfreund at the Pierre Hotel in the spring of 2007. To inaugurate the biggest Jewish literary prize ever, in honor of multi-millionaire Sami Rohr, literati, journalists and organizers had been gathered to one of Manhattan’s glitziest hotels. Gutfreund’s firm no-nonsense manner and even firmer sense of the absurd was in full…
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David Mamet’s American Snoozefest
“QUESTION: WHAT IS DRAMA?” When he was running the CBS series “The Unit,” the expert and expertly hectoring dramatist David Mamet a memo to his writers, complete with excessive capitalization and the occasional bolded phrase. “DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE…
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Jewish Latinos Get National Public Radio Spotlight
“There are these two worlds, the Jewish world and the Latino world, and we talk about them often like they’re two totally separate communities,” Michael Johnson said. “That’s not entirely true. There’s a middle part where they meet. There are all of these people who have very different experiences being both. We wanted to take…
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Books Al Franken Signs $1M Book Deal on Years in Congress
Sen. Al Franken signed a deal to write a non-fiction book about his years in Congress. The deal is for at least $1 million, the the Huffington Post reported, citing sources close to the process. Franken is a second-term Democratic senator from Minnesota and a former writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live.” He is…
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Caught Between the Yeshiva and the Deep Blue Sea
When I was in yeshiva, there was a man who had been in beit medrash every day since 1953. Yes, every day in the afternoon he came to study the holy books, without fail. He had started as a young boy, and by the time I was 20, he was in his 50s. He had…
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In Case You Missed 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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Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
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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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