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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On Alexandre, the Greatest Jewish Composer You’ve Never Heard of
When “Ida” received the Oscar for best foreign film, it put a global spotlight on a Polish story about that nation’s struggle to face Jewish memories from the Nazi era. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave a concert that touched on these themes in a different way. The orchestra performed the long-awaited American…
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Some of Abe Lincoln’s Best Friends Were Jewish. Honestly.
● Lincoln and the Jews: A History By Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell Thomas Dunne Books, 288 pages, $40 As far as we know, Abraham Lincoln never said, “Some of my best friends are Jewish.” But he certainly could have. Lincoln did chide his anti-Semitic Civil War generals and others who expressed the prejudices…
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Chasing ‘The Messiah’ and Bruno Schulz’s Long-Lost Novel
Despite the limited number of literary works that survived his life, cut short by a Nazi’s bullet in wartime Poland, many today view Bruno Schulz as one of the 20th century’s most interesting and imaginative writers. First brought to public light in the United States in the 1970s by Philip Roth, he inspired such prominent…
The Latest
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14 Facts About Jewish West Virginia
1) About 2,300 Jews live in West Virginia, which is 0.1 percent of the state’s population. 2) Every four years, the West Virginia Jewish Reunion is held in Charleston, reuniting hundreds of former and current residents from across the state. The event, which is sponsored by descendants of Simon and Ida Meyer of Huntington, includes…
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Why David Greenspan Is Easy To Admire But Hard To Like
I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees By David Greenspan Directed by Leigh Silverman Abrons Arts Center Over the course of decades, the writer, director and actor David Greenspan has built a body of work that downtown theater people consider with something close to awe while the general public has often been baffled. He’s won six Obie…
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A Haggadah for Just About Every Taste
“Who’s this year’s Cokie Roberts?” That’s what my partner asked, as I rifled through this year’s crop of new Haggadot. Each year, it seemed, brought a new edition written or edited by a celebrity: Cokie Roberts, Nathan Englander, Edgar Bronfman, Elie Wiesel. But not this year. And browsing Amazon’s best-sellers, I got a sense of…
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How Shulem Deen Lost Everything and Found Himself
All Who Go Do Not Return By Shulem Deen Graywolf Press, 288 pages, $16 Family and God are the essences of a Hasid’s life. From cradle to death, one is taught to love, fear and obey God, and to cherish and respect family and all the customs, traditions and quirks that are the hallmarks of…
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Books A Perfectly Modern Passover
This is an occasional column in which the writer evaluates a cookbook by making some of its recipes, sharing the dishes with friends and asking those friends what they think of the results. For Passover, the writer cooked her way through “Modern Jewish Cooking: Recipes & Customs for Today’s Kitchen,” by Forward writer and contributing…
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Books Roasted Beet Salad With Preserved Lemon
Photograph by Sang An With all due respect to the classic pairing of beets and goat cheese, there are other ways to serve cooked beets! Take this salad, which tosses them with preserved lemon, fennel, basil and capers. The lemon and capers act as a tangy counterpart to the sweet Mediterranean root, and the fresh…
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Lisette Garcia, a Freedom Fighter for Information
Few people speak the language of government transparency more fluently than Lisette Garcia. When she was growing up as the daughter of Cuban exiles in Miami, she says, the idea of “the government sort of owning all the information” was ever present. She later became a reporter for the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star and…
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The True Story of Harry Houdini’s Tefillin
In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, Laura Hillenbrand, the best-selling author of “Seabiscuit” and “Unbroken,” revealed that she actually buys old newspapers to do her research. This allows her to see some of the other stories that were occurring at the same time. Hillenbrand hits on one of the surprising joys of what…
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