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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Was the Holocaust Made Possible by Demise of European States?
In his 2010 book “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” historian Timothy Snyder examined the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history. That book rethought some key assumptions of both Holocaust and Soviet history by noting similarities and interactions between the two regimes and the events…
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Drawing Out the Secret World of New Yorker Cartoonists
Before a recent screening of “Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists” at HBO’s headquarters, director Leah Wolchok introduced her debut documentary. Standing behind a mahogany podium and wearing white thick-rimmed glasses, she spoke with a slight undertone of annoyance about how long it took to finish the film. So long, in…
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6 Unexpected Jewish Things About Alan Rickman
Let’s face it, there’s not much Jewish about Alan Rickman, the famed British who died of cancer on 14 January. He is well-known for playing our favorite villains, like Harry Potter’s Severus Snape and Die Hard’s Hans Gruber. But in reality, Rickman was mensch: married to the same woman for over 40 years, a close…
The Latest
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VIDEO: On Being a New Yorker Cartoonist
In December, 2015, Leah Wolchok’s documentary “Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists” debuted on HBO. Among the featured cartoonists in the film is Liana Finck, a Forward contributor and the author of “A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York.” The Forward asked Finck about her own feelings about…
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Meet the Orthodox Star of Oscar-Nominated ‘Son of Saul’
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In November of 2015, Geza Rohrig, the 48 year-old Hungarian-born lead actor of “Son of Saul,” an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, had an unexpectedly poignant moment. In the film, Rohrig plays a member of the Sonderkommando, the units of Jewish male prisoners in the…
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Elena Ferrante’s Jewish Inspiration
When Hitler traveled to Rome to meet with Mussolini in 1938, Elsa Morante stood by her window with a pot of boiling oil on the stove. The duo’s parade route was going to pass directly below her apartment, and she was planning to dump the scalding liquid on their heads as they went by. She…
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Film & TV Why Gad Elmaleh Is the Most Popular Jewish Comic You’ve Never Heard of
Gad Elmaleh is working out a bit. The Moroccan-Jewish-French comedian and I are sitting in the lobby of a swanky Tribeca hotel the night after his show at Joe’s Pub in downtown Manhattan, talking about his foray into English-language stand-up comedy. Elmaleh, who was born in Casablanca, is wondering whether there’s room in his act…
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Film & TV These Are the Films To See at the 25th New York Jewish Film Festival
Starting January 13, Lincoln Center will play host to the New York Jewish Film Festival for the 25th time. “We’re taking the opportunity to look back at some of the highlights of films that premiered over the 25 years,” said Aviva Weintraub, the festival’s director. That retrospective takes the form of nine films that were…
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Clemson Jews Are Proud of Tigers as College Football’s Big Game Looms
In the lead up to tonight’s National Championship football game, we have provided thorough coverage of the Alabama Crimson Tide’s exceptional season through our own Birmingham Jewish Federation lens. After finding out last week who Alabama’s final opponent would be, however, we decided to do a little “scouting” our competition. Therefore, we set out to…
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The Crowd at the Met Just Got a Whole Lot Younger
On a recent drizzly Monday morning, the usual adult crowd at the Metropolitan Opera was replaced by 2,000 rowdy schoolchildren who were there to watch the last dress rehearsal of “The Barber of Seville.” Out on the plaza in front of the theater, teachers rounded up stray children playing tag. “Hold hands!” they ordered, and…
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How Did Nazi-Looted Art Wind Up in Israel — and What Can Be Done About It?
Yagna Yass-Alston, a Polish doctoral student, was on a fellowship in Israel last year when she visited the Museum of Art Ein Harod in the Jezreel Valley. She wanted to look at two paintings there for her dissertation research on Jewish art collectors in Krakow. Looking into the museum’s inventory files, a reference to a…
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