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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Art
Ben Shahn Was a Propagandist and Proud of It
Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene By Diana L. Linden Wayne State University Press, 184 pages, $44.99 Albert Einstein disembarking in America alongside anonymous impoverished refugees. Prescient views in 1939 of concentration camp prisoners in Nazi Germany. These are just two of the indelible images created on a monumental scale…
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A Distinguished History in Art Theft
Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures By Susan Ronald St. Martin’s Press, 400 pages, $27.99 In 2012, German investigators broke into the apartment of the Munich recluse Cornelius Gurlitt and confiscated nearly 1,300 pieces of modern art, much of it of murky or suspicious provenance. Gurlitt had inherited…
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Film & TV How Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe Became Jews — Through Andy Warhol’s Eyes
On a spring day in 1956, Rabbi Robert E. Goldburg paid a visit to Marilyn Monroe’s New York City apartment. Before the 30-year-old actress tied the knot with playwright Arthur Miller that summer, she wanted to convert to Judaism. In a neatly typed letter set inside a display case at the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit…
The Latest
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Four Decades Later, They’re Still Banking on ‘The Rothschilds’
Book writer Sherman Yellen and lyricist Sheldon Harnick say the timing is spot-on for a new look at their 1970 musical “The Rothschilds,” which has been revised and dubbed “Rothschild & Sons” for its October run with The York Theatre Company, in New York. The Tony-nominated musical, with a score composed by the late Jerry…
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A Plea for Remembrance — and for Forgetting
Not too long ago, my bubbe and zayde lived in a crowded apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was a place filled with books and Yiddish newspapers strewn over the armchairs (the Forward, Die Morgen Journal, Der Algemeiner). There was a sense of holy, righteous and predetermined doom, as though all the…
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Books ‘Series of Unfortunate Events’ Author Gives $1M to Planned Parenthood
Daniel Handler is finally trying to make the world a less unfortunate place. The Jewish author of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and his wife, illustrator Lisa Brown, have pledged a million dollars to Planned Parenthood, . Handler, known to readers under the pen-name Lemony Snicket, tweeted out the news on Tuesday afternoon: .@lisabrowndraws &…
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How Solomon Schechter’s Daughter Became a Card-Carrying Communist
<image In my mind’s eye, I see my great-aunt Amy. She is leading a march, striding toward a line of police officers wielding batons, her hands clenched in determination and worry. She is speaking at a rally, extolling the need for working men and women to organize, warning that the bosses will resist efforts to…
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Did Dismantling of States Make the Worst of the Holocaust a Reality?
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning By Timothy Snyder Tim Duggan Books, 462 pages, $30 In two generations, we have witnessed a massive shift in our attitude toward the Holocaust: from regarding it as incomprehensible, defying human understanding, to trying to construct rigorous, often competing historical explanations for its causes and contours. There…
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Worshipping Koufax, Worshipping God
My father, a first-generation American, was an accountant, which is relevant because he was a sedentary, chubby, somewhat bookish man who never tossed a ball with me, not once, and who paid no attention to Major League Baseball. When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were millions of Jewish fathers who were accountants…
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The Thrill of Family for Bestselling Novelist Brad Meltzer
Brad Meltzer, 45, is a bestselling novelist of thrillers like “The President’s Shadow,” and children’s books like “I Am Albert Einstein,” as well as a host for the To research his thrillers, Meltzer has received help from fans like Presidents Bill Clinton and George HW Bush. His wife, Cori Meltzer, 45, is a lawyer and…
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Music Pianist James Rhodes and the Keys to Survival
Born in 1975, the British Jewish musician James Rhodes has experienced a fairly dramatic trajectory, which he described in his recent autobiography, “Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music.” As Rhodes revealed in a blog in the Daily Telegraph: “When I was at school I was sexually abused. Let me clarify: I was serially…
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