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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Film & TV
High Praise for Ant Man and Short Jewish Men
I was really excited to see “Ant-Man.” It combines many of the things I love: ants (which I love mostly on screens, à la “Microcosmos,” and not near any of my desserts), superheroes (who I love, despite their ingrained sexist flaws) and Paul Rudd (who I love, unconditionally). As for the man in my life,…
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We See Your Israeli Gillette Ad, And Raise You 14 Jewish Beards
Movember may be months away but the latest facial hair viral video is already here, courtesy of a Gillette campaign in Israel. With over a million views, the ad follows an Israeli man who shaves his beard after 14 years. Barely recognized by his father, he then gives a beardless surprise to his wife and…
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How Judy Brown Learned To Love Her Little Brother
Judy Brown used to say her little brother was “crazy as a bat.” Nobody in her community or even in her family understood the boy who terrorized baby sitters and flapped his hands in the air. Even Brown wished he would go away. If Hashem performs miracles, she wondered, why couldn’t He “cure” her brother?…
The Latest
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Why I Love ‘Wet Hot American Summer,’ Lame Jokes And All
Ah! “Wet Hot American Summer,” why dost thou tickle me so? Really, there’s no good reason that this movie should! For I share none of the nostalgia it proffers! None, I say! Or do I? I’ll confess that my only experiences of Jewish sleep-away camp weren’t exactly traditional. But were they as absurd as Camp…
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When Nina Simone Sang Jewish Songs
(JTA) — Jeff Lieberman was en route to a South Carolina screening of his first feature, “Re-emerging: The Jews of Nigeria,” when he realized how close he’d be to the tiny Blue Ridge Mountain town of Tryon, North Carolina. The New York-based filmmaker couldn’t pass up a side trip to the birthplace of Eunice Kathleen Waymon…
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Son of Nazi War Criminal Defaced Jewish Cemetery
100 Years Ago Hyman Liebman, who is currently on trial for the murder of his 7-year-old daughter, Sadie, is fighting for his own life. Liebman, who also threw his 5-year-old son, Samuel, out of a fifth-floor tenement window on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has not had much to say during the trial and has pleaded…
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This Is Your Brain on Kabbalah
Kabbalah: A Neurocognitive Approach to Mystical Experiences By Shahar Arzy and Moshe Idel Yale University Press, 216 pages, $50 Eight hundred years before Oliver Sacks started poking around patients’ brains to see how they produce hallucinations, another Jew, Abraham Abulafia, was doing similar research on himself — by purposely inducing his own hallucinations. Except, he…
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Film & TV How Woody Allen Lost Me
Here’s a free idea for a play. Or maybe it’s just a skit. I was thinking of writing it a while back, but the premise seemed thin, so I set it aside. It’s a light comedy, circa 1970-something. A young, neurotic film critic — just getting out of yet another bad relationship — is visited…
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How a French Museum Whitewashes Le Corbusier’s Anti-Semitism
Le Corbusier — the Swiss-French master of modernist architecture — was a fascist sympathizer who had an office in Vichy during the Second World War and displayed anti-Semitism in his private correspondence. But an exhibition currently running at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, “Le Corbusier: Mesures de l’homme,” won’t tell you any of this. The…
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Why My Grandfather Played the Lottery
Every Friday my maternal grandfather, Rabbi Abraham Twersky, a scion of a long line of Hasidic rebbes straight from the Baal Shem Tov, who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the ’60s and ’70s, would buy a lottery ticket. He did so sheepishly, but also with a little pride. “I have bitochen…
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The Progress of Poet Maxine Kumin
The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir By Maxine Kumin W.W. Norton & Company, 176 pages, $25.95 In her poem “Sonnets Uncorseted,” Maxine Kumin bemoans the sexist attitudes that constrained 20th-century American women poets. Immersed in motherhood and domesticity, she confesses to having been “Terrified of writing domestic poems,/… anathema to the prevailing clique of male pooh-bahs[.]”…
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