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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KlezKamp Lives On With ‘Yiddish New York’
When the announcement was made last fall that KlezKamp, the Yiddish folk arts gathering that took place in the Catskills every winter for the last 30 years, was ending, some of the movers and shakers in the klezmer scene resolved to organize a replacement. Now comes word that Yiddish New York will take place in…
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The 100-Year Vision of Moscot Eyewear
There’s an old Yiddish expression my Lower East Side grandmother Ida was fond of: “When luck happens, offer it a seat.” Luck happened. My family has been loyal customers of Moscot Eyewear for nearly 100 of its 100 years; my bespectacled elderly father will buy from no one else, and my grandparents bought there when…
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New Yiddish Journal Launches In Style
On August 3 more than 100 people packed the second floor of Solas, a trendy bar in the East Village. Over the din of music by Nicki Minaj and Drake, a group of people huddled in a corner discussing stills from a new website being displayed on a laptop. A passerby, seeing a large group…
The Latest
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One Jewish Woman’s Quest to Become Joan Didion
I can’t wait to read “The Last Love Song,” Tracy Daugherty’s upcoming Joan Didion biography, or to see the film Hollywood producers are planning to make of Didion’s iconic “Goodbye to All That.” I was in college when I first devoured that essay about the Episcopalian author’s early years in New York. I can envision…
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Why Jewish Anxiety Is No Laughing Matter
I’ve been biting my nails ever since I’ve had a full set of baby teeth. Sometimes I twirl my hair, tap my foot or overanalyze everyday situations. For me, Woody Allen’s neurotic existential musings or Larry David’s socially awkward malaise come as assurance I’m in good company. They validate anxiety as a fact of life….
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Did Josef Mengele Alter This Survivor’s Genes?
The Holocaust altered Eva Kor’s body forever in a way that she still doesn’t fully understand. When she was ten years old, Kor and her twin sister, Miriam — along with 1,500 other sets of twins — were test subjects of Dr. Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician who used fraternal and identical twins at Auschwitz…
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Want To Live to 120? Look to the Jews.
Molveine Karan raised her arms steadily above her head, tapped her foot lightly against the floor as she moved her leg, and tilted her neck back and forth. “If you don’t do it, you stiffen up like a board,” the 98-year-old said. Karan was demonstrating her morning routine, which includes an hour of stretching and…
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A Tale of Two Flags, Confederate and Zionist
Most of the time we pay it little mind, but now and again it surfaces with a vengeance and takes center stage. At once artifact and symbol, decorative motif and rallying cry, it flutters in the wind, is waved up and down and is attended to with all manner of ceremony. I’m referring, of course,…
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Welcome to Fire Island, Fantasy of Jewish Paradise
(JTA) — It was Friday evening and the cantor, wearing a leopard-print top and gladiator sandals — including one with a with a tambourine affixed to it — greeted the congregants at Shabbat services with a smile. She encouraged them to pick up the percussion instruments left on the chairs, along with the prayer books. The…
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How a Hitler Youth Member Became an Israeli Stage Legend
Orna Porat, the Israeli actress who died on August 6 at age 91, showed that a sense of betrayal can inspire an exuberant creative career. Born Irene Klein in Cologne, Germany, to Catholic and Protestant parents, as a young girl she joined the Hitler Youth movement, attracted by the pageantry and songs, despite parental disapproval….
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The End of the Beginning of Neal Pollack’s Tour
Adapted From “The Beginning Of The End Of The Tour: Days On The Road With Neal Pollack, A Writer Of Whom I Wish I’d Never Heard,” by Aaron Lipschultz Screenplay by Joshua Lipstein Aaron Lipschultz, a successful journalist in his late 20s, enters a middle-American diner. There sits Neal Pollack, a mostly-failed novelist in his…
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