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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When Ethel Met (Hurricane) Sandy
My mother would deck me if I gave away her age, but let me just say that Ethel is closer to 90 than to 70. She continues to commute to work as a jeweler on Manhattan’s Bowery jewelry exchange, something she has done for more than 40 years. Depending on traffic, the roundtrip from Long…
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Art The Case of the Mysterious Photo Box and an Unknown Soldier
About 25 years ago, Alan Teller and Jerri Zbiral bought a shoebox of 127 negatives and prints that they found under a couch at an estate sale in Northbrook, Illinois, near their home in Evanston. Their friend Irving Leiden, who had recently died, had owned the box, and his widow didn’t recall any information about…
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Forward Archives Are Now Digitized And Searchable
More than a century of Jewish life in America, reported in Yiddish, will soon be accessible through a searchable online database. The entire run of the Forverts newspaper — the most widely read Jewish newspaper in the world for much of the 20th century — will become part of the Historical Jewish Press Project, known…
The Latest
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My Big Sabbath Lie — and the Joy It Brought
It is 4 p.m. on a September Friday and I have just completed my first week at one of New York’s august law firms, the kind that prides itself on keeping its junior lawyers toiling into the wee hours and all through the weekend. Yet here I am, heading home to Brooklyn to spend the…
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Why Tobie Nathan Is the Opposite of Freud
Born in Cairo in 1948, the French Jewish author Tobie Nathan and his family were expelled from Egypt in 1957, during the anti-Jewish persecutions of the Nasser regime. Nathan is an ethnopsychiatrist, a specialist in mental illness in different cultures. He has published books on Sigmund Freud and on the Zionist leader Haim Arlosoroff, among…
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How Leonid Yakobson Danced Past Soviet Censorship
Choreographer Leonid Yakobson knew how to fight. When he was a teenager in Petrograd, during the freezing anarchy that followed the Russian Revolution, he acquired a set of iron “knuckles” so that he could beat the thugs who wanted to steal his younger brothers’ winter coats. When he was in his late 60s, Yakobson was…
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Music The First Ever Chinese-Yiddish Song
While writing her Ph.D. dissertation on Jewish Exile in Shanghai resulting from the Shoah, Yang Meng decided she needed to learn both Yiddish and Hebrew for the sake of her research. A Chinese national already fluent in English and German, once she took on the new languages she found herself fascinated by Yiddish, which she…
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Art Is Donna Karan Offering TMI About DKNY?
One day, when fashion icon Donna Karan was 11, she went up in the attic of her home and discovered old family photos hidden away in a trunk. In one, she saw her mom with an unfamiliar man. When her mother, known as Queenie, discovered her there, she became physically abusive. According to Karan’s newly…
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Art The Inner Workings of Isaiah Sheffer
Whenever Isaiah Sheffer, the playwright and director who co-founded Symphony Space, worked in his home, he retreated to “The Mineshaft,” a spacious closet located near what was probably a dumb waiter at one point, furnished with a little desk. The makeshift office also accommodated suits, ties and Sheffer’s toolbox. Over the years, boxes of his…
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How Geraldine Brooks Was Inspired by King David and Leonard Cohen
Brooks’s new novel, 'The Secret Chord,' also has been influenced by her work as a journalist
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Revising and Reviving ‘The Rothschilds’
“Fiddler on the Roof,” composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick’s great, melancholy look at Ashkenazic history, with a book by Joseph Stein, opened on Broadway in 1964 and ran for nearly eight years. It ends, heartbreakingly, with the villagers of Anatevka, ejected from their home, marching west, ready to start new lives — marching,…
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