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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Jewish Pimp Sentenced to 10 Years in Sing Sing
100 Years Ago Jewish pimp Louis Rosenberg was sentenced to a 10-year stint in Sing Sing prison after he was busted for selling a 17-year-old girl to another pimp for $25. It turned out, however, that the other pimp was actually a police detective, and the madam involved was a settlement house worker. Rosenberg met…
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Music Berlin Philharmonic Names First Jewish Music Director
On June 22, it was announced that the musicians of the celebrated Berlin Philharmonic (BPO) have elected their first-ever Jewish music director, the Russian maestro Kirill Petrenko. Not only was this choice ground-breaking, it was an indirect response to another job candidate, the German conductor Christian Thielemann whose right-wing politics and anti-immigrant feelings seemed to…
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Art Jules Feiffer Makes It Look Easy
The first time I saw the way Jules Feiffer drew a line, I was captivated. I was at the School of Visual Arts’ library, reading his Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice strips, and his figures always seemed caught in midmovement, about to jump off the page with electric energy. Prose and drawings seemed effortlessly paired, and…
The Latest
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Beauty Is Always Skin Deep at Israel’s Tattoo Convention
Wandering around Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood the day of the third annual Israel Tattoo Convention, I figured I would encounter a trail of tattooed people who would lead me there. But inked Israelis were on every street corner and coffee shop; I couldn’t quite determine whom to follow. “In Tel Aviv, in the south, every…
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‘Beautiful Minutiae’ in Los Angeles
Laura Nicole Diamond, 46, is a . Her husband, Christopher Heisen, 45, runs an educational technology company, Educational Assessments Corp. The two live in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles with their 18-year-old foster daughter, Maria, and their two sons, Aaron, 14, and Emmett, 10. In August, Laura and Christopher will have been married…
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William Shemin Gets His Medal of Honor — a Century Later
About a year ago I got a phone call out of the blue from a woman who was breathless with excitement over an article I had written for Hadassah magazine about the Jewish experience in World War I. “Do you have a minute?” she asked, identifying herself as 85-year-old Elsie Shemin Roth of St. Louis….
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My Daughter, the Catholic Rabbi
This is the second spring that two robins became parents in a tight little nest woven on the lintel above our front door. Last year, when the nest came down, all that was left were shards of baby-blue eggs. I stood for a long time, wondering if it is sacrilegious to throw out the remains,…
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Art History of Dutch Jews Role in Slavery Is Bluntly Depicted
‘The word ‘slave’ is used in this exhibition,” notes a wall text at “Jews in the Caribbean: Four Centuries of History in Suriname and Curacao” at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum. “The museum is aware of the controversial nature of this term. ‘Slaves,’ as used here, refers to African men, women, and children taken captive and…
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Of Goldie Hawn, Theater J and 8 Other Things About (Jewish) Washington D.C.
1 28,000 Jews live in Washington, D.C. 2 In 1847, there were roughly 25 Jews in all of Washington. 3 Washington’s first Jewish congregation, which came to be known as the Washington Hebrew Congregation, first convened in 1852. But when a melodeon, an organ-like instrument, was introduced at the shul shortly thereafter, a number of…
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In Search of the Jews of Jurassic World
Obviously, it doesn’t matter whether I liked “Jurassic World.” The movie made $520 billion, so one man’s opinion means nothing. But even though I hated that dumb movie as much as I’ve ever hated anything, I still paid my money like all the other chicken-wing-chomping idiots in that suburban theater that Saturday night. At least…
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When Langston Hughes Sang Jewish America
Selected Letters of Langston Hughes By Langston Hughes Edited by Arnold Rampersand Knopf, 480 pages, $35 These missives written by one of the most limpid African-American poets are self-concealing in the extreme. Langston Hughes was so discreet that when he was hospitalized for gonorrhea in 1941, he told intimate friends that the problem was arthritis….
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