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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Natalie Portman Says Directing Debut Was Challenge
Natalie Portman played a ballerina in the grip of psychological trauma in “Black Swan,” but the Israeli actress said she had lots of support while directing her first film, about the childhood of Israeli intellectual Amos Oz, shown in Cannes. Portman both directs and stars in “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” based on Oz’s…
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The Tragedy of Little Mae Berger
The neighborhood of Ghent in Norfolk, Virginia takes its name from a city in Belgium, and is now a chic historic district where restaurant menus highlight gluten-free dishes next to the fried green tomatoes. But 70 years ago, Ghent was a place where struggling Jewish immigrants, buoyed by a war-fueled economy, were able to buy…
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Why Is a Formerly Secular Woman Like Her Running a Chabad Center?
At the age of 13, Keren Blum told her parents that she was an agnostic. Because she also became a vegetarian at that time, her parents, Conservative Jews, were troubled by what they perceived as rebelliousness. They tried to make Judaism joyous and meaningful for her — in vain, at least initially. Blum completed her…
The Latest
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After My Son Came Home From India
When I received the news that my son was returning from India, I was abroad. I was not expecting his return, since I had responded only recently to his urgent email request to renew his medical insurance for the third time. I was livid: How could he do this to me? I seldom travel, and…
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Of Eric Cantor, Dirty Dancing and 8 Other Things About (Jewish) Virginia
1) 95,520 Jews live in Virginia. 2) Congregation Beth Israel, built in 1882 in Charlottesville, is the oldest synagogue in the state. 3) Late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, who died in an airplane crash in 2002, was raised Jewish in Arlington. The Wellstone family name was originally Wexelstein. 4) Much of Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln”…
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The Mystery of Lebanon’s Maghen Abraham Synagogue
No one could quite believe it when the major political factions in Lebanon — including the anti-Israel Shi’a party Hezbollah — threw their support behind a million-dollar synagogue renovation project in Beirut in 2009. But if a public display of Lebanon’s Jewish past was what visionaries behind the yearlong, highly publicized restoration had in mind…
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Bring on the Portable Shabbat
Jewish funding organizations have long been investing in Israel trips, day school, summer camp, and, more recently, children’s books. And now, thanks to grants from the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life and the Paul E. Singer Foundation, young adults can secure funds to execute an age-old weekly Jewish ritual: hosting Shabbat dinners. Called OneTable, the…
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POEM: The Blessed Alphabet
Blessed landlords of the language Blessed era of the language Blessed villages of the language Bless the child on a winter’s-eve In the town, who learns the language in all her chapters her genealogies, her nuances, her grammar Blessed people of the language who fought For her, as a minority, bless he who totters with…
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When Hank Greenberg Went to War
The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII By John Klima Thomas Dunne Books, 432 pages, $27.99 On December 5, 1941, Hank Greenberg walked out of Michigan’s Fort Custer Training Center a free man. Seven months earlier, he had become the first…
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Film & TV Do Marvel Movies Have an Anti-Semitism Problem?
It seems like I can’t go a day without reading about how anti-Semitism is on the rise—not just in Europe but also in the U.S. Sadly this is an attitude reflected in our own geek culture — specifically in the anti-Semitism found in X-Men and Marvel movie universe. Let’s start with the X-Men movies. Magneto,…
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Ezra Mendelsohn Expressed Hope in Humanity’s Potential
The historian Ezra Mendelsohn, who has died of cancer at the age of 74, infused esthetics into the study of Jewish history to an unusual degree. As Rachel & Michael Edelman professor emeritus of European Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, he produced compelling books in which modern Jewish history is informed by…
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