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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War at MOMA, Literally and Figuratively
The first piece you see upon entering the new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War,” is a bronze sculpture situated alone in a brightly lit recess. In Maria Martins’s 1946 “The Impossible, III,” two cartoonish, squat bronze figures struggle to embrace. Human from the…
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Nina Simone, the Mayor of Jerusalem and Me
‘Are you Jewish?” Nina asked me. This was more the kind of question I tended to get from shabbos candle-toting Lubavitchers, not the great Miss Simone. But there she was, sitting close to me in her suite, getting personal. I answered with the truth, “Yes.” She leaned over the couch, and in a low conspiratorial…
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Film & TV How Jan Selby Found Peace in Documentaries
It’s 10 a.m. on a Friday morning, and Jan Selby finally slows down for breakfast. The 56-year-old, Minnesota-based filmmaker stops into the Starbucks across the street from her St. Paul office for an egg sandwich and coffee. “I’ve taken on a little much,” she says. “Between running a company and being involved in three major…
The Latest
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Welcome to Arthur Miller’s Nightmare
“And if I seem to tell this like a dream,” says the lawyer who serves as narrator, as the play reaches its brutal resolution, “it was that way.” The lawyer is Alfieri, our guide through postwar Red Hook in Arthur Miller’s 1955 classic, “A View From the Bridge.” And in the production that opened last…
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Film & TV The Jewish Education of an African Cinema Master
The great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, chose cinema as his primary medium almost by default. A former dock worker who is now affectionately referred to as the “father of African cinema,” Sembene had already published several successful novels when he decided, at the age of 40,…
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Film & TV The Nazi Plot Against America Revisited
Counterfactual speculation about the Third Reich is at an all-time high. In recent weeks, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has claimed that German Jews could have resisted the Nazis more effectively if they had enjoyed access to guns. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that Adolf Hitler never would have ordered the murder of…
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Remembering André Glucksmann, a Man of Courage and Conviction
After a long struggle with cancer, the French intellectual André Glucksmann died this week in Paris at the age of 78. With his death, a certain idea of France — that of a nation imbued by a republican spirit as generous as it is rigorous — grew a bit dimmer. Glucksmann spent his life à…
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How the Littlest Vaudeville Act Survived Josef Mengele’s Lab
When Gaby FeBland was looking through the résumés of actors she was casting in her play, “The Lilliput Troupe,” she was astonished by what she saw. “[These actors], for a lot of them this is the first time they’ve played individuals,” FeBland said. “You had such talented actors audition, and their résumés would just say…
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Film & TV Israel’s Rocking Microcosm
Everyone should be able to agree on Sderot. Leftists, rightists, Jews, non-Jews. A small settlement of folks — unwanted by the countries they’d lived in for centuries, and thrown together in an inhospitable land within internationally accepted boundaries by the will of the central government — have combined to make a vibrant community whose musical…
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Could ‘Baseball Aliyah’ Help Jumpstart American Pastime in Israel?
Baseball is known as the national pastime of the United States. The same cannot be said in Israel, but a new program enlisting American Jewish ballplayers is aimed at honing the skills of Israeli hopefuls and elevating the game in the Jewish state. The Israel Association of Baseball is hoping its “Israel Baseball Experience” program,…
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Was Gore Vidal the Real Crypto-Nazi?
Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal By Jay Parini Doubleday, 480 pages, $35 Gore Vidal was not opposed to the odd rhetorical hand grenade. “As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself,” he told William F. Buckley live on ABC in Chicago in…
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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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Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
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