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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The Only Summer Book Guide You Need To Read
There can be no doubt that people who read are very passionate about reading. But reading is in trouble, because no one reads anymore. Why pick up a book when you could watch celebrities walking their dogs on Periscope or stream all 17 seasons of “House M.D.” using a Kindle Fire stick that’s plugged into…
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Send Us Your Jewish Songs!
“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable,” Leonard Bernstein once said. You’ve proved him right. We have been overwhelmed with responses to our “Soundtrack of Our Spirit” project, for which we asked our readers to nominate Jewish song leaders that inspire their community with their music. Cantors, song writers, folk singers, vocalists, bands…
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Joshua Cohen Is Watching You
In “Book of Numbers,” novelist Joshua Cohen has written a fictional exposé of the technological consequences of surveillance. The novel itself is quite a read, a nearly 600-page whirlwind that focuses on the protagonist, Joshua Cohen, a washed-up writer who has been chosen to write the memoir of another Joshua Cohen, the billionaire founder of…
The Latest
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Film & TV Meet Sophie Tucker, the Yiddish Lady Gaga
Sophie Tucker used to open her act by saying her career dated back to the days when the Dead Sea was just sick. That, of course, is a slight exaggeration. But from around 1907 almost until her death in 1966, the ribald Tucker was the Madonna of her time. Today, in an age when fame…
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How the Archive Thief Saved History — Then Stole It
The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust By Lisa Moses Leff, Oxford University Press, 304 pages, $29.95 Seven decades on, we are still taking stock of the ancillary losses that were part of the Holocaust: the appropriated homes and businesses, the scattered possessions, the purloined artworks…
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How Jews Parted With Possessions Before Craigslist
Got stuff? If you’re anything like me, your closets bulge with clothes you’ve haven’t worn in years, your kitchen shelves are crowded with useless gadgets and the furniture in your living room is so worn out that it gives new – and literal – meaning to thread count. I’d say it’s time to de-clutter and…
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Orthodoxy’s Inconvenient Truths
Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History By Marc B. Shapiro The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 360 pages, $39.95 Orthodox Jews — especially Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox Jews — like to think of their religious practice as the most authentic form of Judaism. “We traditionally observant Jews… seek to observe the Torah’s mandate,…
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New York to London Town
Eytan Bayme and his wife, Cymbeline Kellett, met in New York City, his hometown, and after a whirlwind romance they made the move to London, her hometown. He is 35 and a writer born and raised in Riverdale, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. She, 34, runs a specialist media-buying agency for the arts…
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The Only Abe Foxman Interview You Need To Read
Watching Abraham Foxman, outgoing national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wipe the tears off his face in front of an audience of about 1,200 people is an experience that one is not likely to witness often, if ever again. But it happened at a recent tribute to Foxman that took place at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria…
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How Omar Sharif Worked For Religious Tolerance
The greatest achievement of Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, who died on July 10 in Cairo, may have been to prove that simple nonchalance may be the best path for mutual tolerance between religions. Acclaimed for screen performances in “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago,” Sharif courted controversy by accepting the role of American Jewish gambler…
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Art Nazi Museum Documents Munich’s Ignominious Past — and Puts Hitler in His Place
What would Adolf Hitler say today if he walked by Munich’s recently opened Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism? I posed this question to the German novelist Timur Vermes when we visited the city’s newest and most overdue museum together. Vermes was the perfect person to ask, as he is the author of…
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