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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Overcoming Group Hugs and Other Things I Learned on a Jewish Spiritual Retreat
I’m sitting in the dirt trying to talk to a tree. It’s day two of SoulQuest, a weekend Jewish spiritual retreat in upstate New York, and one of the group leaders, a soft-spoken woman with a wide smile, has instructed us — dared us — to have a conversation out loud with nature. She also…
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Books Wine, Crime and a Jewish Financier
When Frances Dinkelspiel wrote the proposal for her new book, she had planned to leave her own connection to the California wine industry out of it. But as she started writing, she realized she had two intertwining stories to tell. One was a modern crime story — the tale of the 2005 arson fire that…
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The Problem With Mammograms
Hallie Leighton had dense breasts — a fact she discovered only in her late 30s, via a mammogram. She grew up in an Ashkenazi family in New York, pursued a career in writing and worked with organizations promoting peace between Israelis and Arabs. By 2013 she was making a documentary on her father Jan Leighton,…
The Latest
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Art The Not So Avant-Garde Art of Harold Garde
If Harold Garde, a painter who lives in Maine and Florida, wasn’t a nonagenarian, the framework of his exhibit at the Orlando Museum of Art might scare him. The first room of “Harold Garde: Mid-Century to This Century” contains Abstract Expressionist works from the 1950s-70s, while the second room features the more figurative paintings that…
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The Lewisohn Sisters Put the Ooomph in Do-Gooding
Manhattan’s Lower East Side of yesteryear conjures up images of dense and inhospitable streets filled with immigrants determined to get on with the business of becoming American, as well as with social reformers equally determined to accelerate that process. Though well intentioned and good hearted, these reformers, we’re apt to think, were often tone deaf…
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Art Can the Museum of Jewish Heritage Survive?
The Museum of Jewish Heritage is located at the tip of Manhattan, in Battery Park, nestled beside a quaint garden with panoramic views of the Statue of Liberty. Offering three floors of teachings on Jewish life, with objects culled over the past century, the museum aims to educate viewers about Jewish life before, during and…
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Remembering Thomas Toivi Blatt, Survivor of Sobibor
Can we grieve for a man we don’t know? If he was a holocaust survivor who was part of a group that led a revolt and escaped from Sobibor we might. If he was someone who reminded of us of our grandfather, our father, people we knew throughout our lives, we might. If he were…
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Books The ‘Fat Jew’ Talks ‘Mutant’ Millennials and Going to the Strip Club After His Bar Mitzvah
Does this really surprise anyone? The week his first hardcover paper book comes out, “The Fat Jew” is declaring social media, where he has 6.5 million Instagram followers, to be . “I was very much born out of the Internet,” the funnyman (real name the Josh Ostrovsky) tells The Telegraph. “But my feeling is that…
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Music Excavating Lost Pre-War Klezmer Recordings
Ever since the beginning of the klezmer revival in the 1970s, music critics and musicians have wondered just how close to its European roots the music they were performing is. The musicians of the 1970s had access to only two sources from which to learn: the few still-living musicians, such as clarinetist Dave Tarras, and…
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How I Rid Myself of the Evil Eye
‘You came just in time!” Aidel Miller said when I walked into her home in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. Wearing a polka dot shirt and a long black skirt, she was standing over a woman draped in a beige blanket. The woman peeked out shyly and tucked her head back in….
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Martin Duberman’s Radical 85-Year Journey Through White America
‘The older I get, the more radical I get.” So says Martin Duberman, the strikingly youthful-looking 85-year-old author, activist, CUNY professor emeritus and playwright, whose groundbreaking civil rights drama “In White America” is being remounted — with some revisions — on its 50th anniversary. “Like all political theater, it’s a call to action,” Duberman says….
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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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