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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A Jewish Call To Right Wrongful Convictions
The first time Judaism and wrongful convictions collided for New York Post crime reporter Reuven Fenton was in 2013, when he covered a hearing in which a Brooklyn judge freed David Ranta, wrongfully convicted for murdering esteemed Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger 22 years earlier. The made-for-tabloid story sparked an investigation into egregious official misconduct by the…
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Why We Need a New Saul Bellow…and Many Other New Things
‘Surely one of the healthier ironies of the United States is that its finest postwar novelist was an illegal immigrant from Canada. I realize that in pointing this out I risk stoking the moronic inferno of this season’s national seekers of high office, but also, more seriously, of mischaracterizing Saul Bellow’s genius.” —Why We Need…
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Learning To Build A Business In ‘One Month’
The offices of One Month, Mattan Griffel’s startup in SoHo, are the first I’ve ever seen that have a wine fridge en suite. They also feature a fridge stocked with kombucha, and a pillow adorned with a smiling image of Griffel and his One Month co-founder, Chris Castiglione. When Griffel met me at the office…
The Latest
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Scholars Are Finally Tackling Yiddish Children’s Literature
In the 1921 Yiddish children’s book “The Wind That Got Angry,” by Moyshe Kulbak, an “old, wandering wind” finds himself booted out of his village when a thaw sets in. He tries to find somewhere in the woods to rest. He’s tired and wants to sleep, but no one wants him around. The oak tree…
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The Secret Identity in My Spam Folder
Appearances, as we all know, can be deceiving. If you looked at me, you’d see an oldish, unprepossessing, rather dull fellow dedicated to his daughters and his work, and anything but a master of the universe. But that is not the whole story. There is, alas, another me, tucked away out of sight. This other…
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Why We Want Our Plantings To Be Like Us
‘They say you’re smart,” my friend Chavi emailed me a couple weeks ago, “ “so solve my problem, please.” I wanted to hear more about the unnamed “they” — we could be friends, I was sure — but Chavi’s dilemma was pressing. A former ultra-Orthodox woman, Chavi is now the mother of two young children,…
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How I Found Myself Living Out a 1980s Video Game
In 1984, my time was mostly divided among school, preparing for my bar mitzvah and playing Castle Wolfenstein on my family’s Apple II+. Castle Wolfenstein was a game about a prisoner escaping from a Nazi bunker. The bunker is labyrinthine, with multiple levels. I knew every inch of it. Everywhere there were guards, but they…
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The Secret Jewish History of Bosnia and Sarajevo
There are bullet holes on apartment blocks, civil buildings and places of worship. Even the tombstones in the Jewish cemetery are pockmarked. Located high on the hillside overlooking Sarajevo, the graveyard presented itself as the perfect frontline position during the city’s siege in the 1990s. Its graves bear silent witness to the Serbian snipers who…
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Why We Should Applaud New York Philharmonic’s Next Director
On January 27, after the New York Philharmonic named Jaap van Zweden as its next music director starting in 2018, an outcry from local journalists and international bloggers decried the decision. One blogger confidently proclaimed: “New York Philharmonic appoints the wrong music director.” These premature judgments based on insufficient evidence ignore the fact that in…
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Primo Levi and the Italian Resistance
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy By Sergio Luzzatto; translated by Frederika Randall Metropolitan Books, 284 pages, $30 Poet, memoirist, essayist, novelist and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987) is best known as a cool-eyed survivor and chronicler of Auschwitz. But he was also briefly a Resistance fighter in the mountains of northwest Italy,…
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Film & TV How ‘The Birdcage’ Married Jewish and Gay Civil Rights
‘I see my tiger robe on television,” my mother says to me on the phone. “What am I watching?” I pause for a split second to think. I’m about 1,300 miles away from her. But I know: “The Birdcage.” My mother chuckles. She’s talking about the scene in the now iconic 1996 comedy where Robin…
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