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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Of Joe Biden, the Heimlich Maneuver and 8 Other Facts About (Jewish) Delaware
1) 15,100 Jews live in Delaware. 2) Former Delaware Senator and current vice-president Joe Biden ran afoul of the Anti-Defamation League in September, 2014, for using the term “Shylocks” to refer to people who engage in nefarious business practices. 3) In 1971, businessman Irving Shapiro became the first person outside of the Dupont family to…
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Alice in Anti-Semitic Land
● Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle By Edward Wakeling I. B. Tauris, 480 pages, $49 Most biographies of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the English logician and Anglican deacon who signed “Alice in Wonderland” with the pen name Lewis Carroll, misunderstood their subject entirely. In his new book, Edward Wakeling persuasively argues that Carroll was…
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The Reformation of Morris Dickstein
● Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education By Morris Dickstein Liveright Publishing, 301 pages, $27.95 For more than 40 years, Morris Dickstein has been a dedicated, much-admired professor, scholar and author. He has achieved prominence and a wide audience for his astute essays of cultural criticism. In his first book, “The Gates of…
The Latest
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Voices of Holocaust Survivors Resound in Words of Grandchildren
● God, Faith & Identity From the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors Edited by Menachem Rosensaft Jewish Lights Publishing, 352 pages, $25. Israel prize winner and this generation’s most gifted Talmudist, David Weiss Halivni, who was born in Sighet, Romania, a year and a day before his friend and fellow sighter,…
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Was John Wilkes Booth Jewish?
In one of the most surprising sections of their new book, “Lincoln and the Jews,” historians Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell discuss the possibility that the president’s assassin belonged to a family of Spanish Jewish ancestry. Asia Booth Clarke, the sister of acclaimed actor John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln, stated in her 1882…
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All That’s ‘Gold’ Does Not Always Glitter
If Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” motivated young travelers to chat up random passengers on the train, make an impromptu stop in Vienna, spend the night wandering its streets, and finish off by having sex in the Stadtpark, Simon Curtis’s “Woman in Gold” might serve as inspiration for a different sort of tourist experience. Young American…
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10 Ways to Make a More Modern Seder
The modern American Seder is as varied as the families who gather to celebrate it. There are more than 1,600 Haggadot to choose from, including a hip-hop version for those who want to rap their Seder tunes, an ecological Haggadah that asks us to consider the trees and a 30-Minute Seder that has you nibbling…
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Los Angeles Synagogue Houses Mosque and Church Too
(JTA) — On the first floor of the Pico Union Project, members of the Women’s Mosque of America are preparing the historic sanctuary for prayers, spreading long bolts of cloth on the floor, hanging a banner from the organ loft and placing an open copy of the Koran in the just-vacated Holy Ark. Outside, news…
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Country Roads Took Me Home to West Virginia
Upon graduation, many college students land jobs in big cities. I went to West Virginia. The move generated quizzical looks from my family and friends in the Northeast. What kind of place is that for an aspiring young Jew? Turns out, it was perfect. Upon graduation, many college students land jobs in big cities. I…
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Nicole Eisenman Is an Artist With a Lot on Her ‘Seder’ Plate
The first things I noticed when standing in front of Nicole Eisenman’s “Seder,” a painting commissioned by the Jewish Museum in 2010 depicting a family Passover gathering, were the hands. Garishly pink and fleshy, they rise from the lower edge of the canvas. They’re cartoonish, really, like something out of the work of Philip Guston,…
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Will Helen Mirren Be Typecast as a Jew?
When I first meet Helen Mirren, the actress pauses before she shakes my hand. Instead, she goes for the hand sanitizer. “I’m appearing in a play,” she says, “and I’m deathly afraid of catching a cold.” I suggest a fist bump instead, but once sanitized she goes with the more traditional route. Mirren is currently…
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