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
How I Stole Chantal Akerman’s Ideas For the Obama White House
When I met Chantal Akerman, the famed film director whose alleged suicide was reported on October 6, I told her I was going to steal her shit. I didn’t blurt it out exactly like that, but having just seen her film “D’est” projected on a big beautiful screen at Cornell Cinema in 1995, I was…
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Frank Sinatra’s Love Affair With the Jewish People
“Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World,” by the American Jewish poet and anthologist David Lehman, will appear in time for the centenary of Ol’ Blue Eyes, on December 12. The icon who belted out “Come Fly With Me,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Kind of Town,” and “New York,…
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Film & TV Chantal Akerman, Pioneering Feminist Filmmaker, Dies at 65
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, a daughter of Holocaust survivors known for her experimental films that closely examined women’s lives, has died in Paris. She was 65. French media reported that Akerman committed suicide. The date and cause are not yet known, according to the New York Times. Her parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, and her…
The Latest
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Film & TV Jeffrey Tambor Talks ‘Transparent’ and the Kosher Chicken Dance at New Yorker Festival
Jeffrey Tambor used to be that actor you saw everywhere but couldn’t place. No longer. In January, he won a Golden Globe in the Best Actor in a TV Series category, for his performance as Maura Pfefferman, a Jewish father of three who comes out as transgender, in Amazon’s “Transparent.” In September he took home…
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Books Why Secular-to-Orthodox Memoirs Matter
“Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.” This quote from Ann Patchett sums up my feelings about writing — and it’s also how I feel about my chosen religious lifestyle. I grew up in a secular Jewish home and, as a young adult, was drawn…
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A Tale of David Simon and Two Jewish Lawyers
When I was in high school in Baltimore County, Maryland, there was a lame joke that was equally popular with white and black students. I attended Pikesville High School, a public school so Jewish, a popular rumor claimed that rival schools had thrown bagels on the field at sporting events. The school sits on the…
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Books ‘The Mystics of Mile End’ Takes You Inside Hasidic Montreal
The Mystics of Mile End, Forward editor Sigal Samuel’s debut novel about a dysfunctional Jewish family, will be published by HarperCollins on October 13. Told from multiple perspectives, the story takes place in an iconic Montreal neighborhood that is home to hipsters and Hasidic Jews. In this excerpt, we see the family and their neighbors…
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Art A Wandering Sukkah Draws Curious Onlookers
There is a 1960s style sukkah bolted atop a black 2003 Chevrolet pickup with Connecticut plates driving through all five boroughs this week that looks unlike any wooden hut I made in Hebrew School during the holiday of Sukkot. It actually brought to mind the pattern of a vintage faux Pucci turtleneck I own and…
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Despite Government Resistance, Beer Flows Freely for Palestinians
Beer festivals are not common events in the Muslim majority West Bank, but the Taybeh Brewing Company, a Palestinian microbrewery, has made Oktoberfest an important part of the Palestinian cultural calendar. Hosting its 11th annual Oktoberfest this September, Taybeh Beer transformed Taybeh, a serene West Bank village, into a celebration of Palestinian beer. Thousands of…
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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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