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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Did Josef Mengele Alter This Survivor’s Genes?
The Holocaust altered Eva Kor’s body forever in a way that she still doesn’t fully understand. When she was ten years old, Kor and her twin sister, Miriam — along with 1,500 other sets of twins — were test subjects of Dr. Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician who used fraternal and identical twins at Auschwitz…
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A Tale of Two Flags, Confederate and Zionist
Most of the time we pay it little mind, but now and again it surfaces with a vengeance and takes center stage. At once artifact and symbol, decorative motif and rallying cry, it flutters in the wind, is waved up and down and is attended to with all manner of ceremony. I’m referring, of course,…
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Welcome to Fire Island, Fantasy of Jewish Paradise
(JTA) — It was Friday evening and the cantor, wearing a leopard-print top and gladiator sandals — including one with a with a tambourine affixed to it — greeted the congregants at Shabbat services with a smile. She encouraged them to pick up the percussion instruments left on the chairs, along with the prayer books. The…
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Want To Live to 120? Look to the Jews.
Molveine Karan raised her arms steadily above her head, tapped her foot lightly against the floor as she moved her leg, and tilted her neck back and forth. “If you don’t do it, you stiffen up like a board,” the 98-year-old said. Karan was demonstrating her morning routine, which includes an hour of stretching and…
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How a Hitler Youth Member Became an Israeli Stage Legend
Orna Porat, the Israeli actress who died on August 6 at age 91, showed that a sense of betrayal can inspire an exuberant creative career. Born Irene Klein in Cologne, Germany, to Catholic and Protestant parents, as a young girl she joined the Hitler Youth movement, attracted by the pageantry and songs, despite parental disapproval….
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The End of the Beginning of Neal Pollack’s Tour
Adapted From “The Beginning Of The End Of The Tour: Days On The Road With Neal Pollack, A Writer Of Whom I Wish I’d Never Heard,” by Aaron Lipschultz Screenplay by Joshua Lipstein Aaron Lipschultz, a successful journalist in his late 20s, enters a middle-American diner. There sits Neal Pollack, a mostly-failed novelist in his…
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Romance Novel About Nazi Guard and Concentration Camp Inmate Has Everyone Angry
(JTA) — German thinker Theodor Adorno famously stated that it’s barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, but he said nothing about romance novels. For author Kate Breslin, the Holocaust apparently provided just the right amount of narrative tension for her new book “For Such a Time,” inspired by the Book of Esther. The novel, which…
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Music A-Wa’s Unlikely Journey From Rural Israel to Global Fame
A trio of sisters wearing hot pink hijabs piles into a dusty white Jeep and rambles across the desert. At home in the village, a man with a closely-cropped white beard shaded by his military cap whips a lash upon the cracked, sandy ground, while an elderly woman with sunken eyes and gold-painted fingernails puffs…
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Move Over ‘Project Runway.’ Here Comes Israel’s ‘Skin Wars’
(JTA) — The world of reality TV is vast and scary, and I know because I watch way too much of it. But there are surprising gems to be found, and Game Show Network’s is one of them. Currently in its second season, the reality competition show is modeled after “Project Runway,” but instead of fashion-design…
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Sketching Life With a Rare Disease
Mindy Indy sits in her apartment, head bent over a large piece of sketch paper, carefully outlining a young boy’s glasses with her ink pen. She’s already penciled out the scene — two teens sitting on a porch, as the boy tries in earnest to explain the symptoms he experiences from familial dysautonomia, a Jewish…
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What ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ and Jon Stewart Have in Common
Shofar-dick fights aside (yes, that’s crossing shofars held at crotch-level), there’s nothing really new about “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp.” But that’s why it works so well! Of course, the jokes are new, with gems like an incoherent “Starlight Express”-like musical, a token Israeli counselor who’s into threesomes and yurt-living, and a…
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Fast Forward After Netanyahu and Cindy McCain meet, she calls out ‘desperation’ in Gaza, and he accuses her of ‘misrepresentation’
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Fast Forward Trump lawyer who praised ‘Mein Kampf’ is now accusing Harvard of antisemitism, report says
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