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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How YIVO Became a Lasting Cultural Center
YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture By Cecile Esther Kuznitz Cambridge University Press, 324 pages, $95 As it stands today, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is the brick-and-mortar memory of East European Jewry. Photographs, letters, theater placards, diaries, institutional records, and rabbinical responsa are just some of the documents in its collection….
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Art American Jews Are Ready For Their Selfie
On a bright, sunny day in 2007, Alina and Jeff Bliumis stood on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, asking strangers to choose an identity. Volunteers could pick from three options — “Jewish,” “American” and “Russian” — and then pose in front of the sign or signs bearing that designation. By the end of the day, 52…
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A Jewish Comedian’s Guide to China
(JTA) — How do you tell a joke in China about Jews when the only things most Chinese think they know about the Chosen People is that they’re smart and good with money? That was Jesse Appell’s quandary when he moved to China three years ago from Massachusetts with plans to become a comedian — and,…
The Latest
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Why Al Pacino Is Wrong To Reject a Nazi Sympathizer
This week actor Al Pacino, a cinematic legend, canceled his participation in a Danish theater adaptation of Knut Hamsun’s novel “Hunger” (1890). The reason, said the Aveny-T theater’s manager, Jon Stephenson, was that Pacino “couldn’t come to terms with Knut Hamsun’s support for the German occupation and Nazism.” And while there’s no question that Hamsun’s…
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Cooking Sabra-Style in Brooklyn
Israeli native , 44, is a chef and restaurateur, who with her husband Stefan Nafziger, 39, owns and manages some of New York City’s most popular eateries. Their three restaurants, Balaboosta, Taïm and Bar Bolonat offer contemporary Israeli food that has earned them some accolades along the way. Admony and Nafziger have been living together…
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Music Why Neil Diamond Still Matters
Back in 1967, in the midst of his initial run of brilliantly pithy three-chord pop singles, Neil Diamond cut a pair of radio jingles for Coca-Cola. One of them was an upbeat rocker in the Latin-tinged “Cherry, Cherry” vein, the other a slow strummer that built to a crescendo a la “I Got the Feelin’…
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How David Javerbaum Became Ghost Writer for God
David Javerbaum’s list of accomplishments stretches from Earth all the way to heaven. He’s won 11 Emmys and two Peabody awards as writer and producer of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” While there, he helped author “America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction” (winner of the Thurber Prize for Humor) and its…
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Why the World Still Needs Saul Bellow
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune By Zachary Leader Knopf, 832 pages, $40 ‘Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked on his deathbed. By “man,” of course, he meant mensch. Zachary Leader, Bellow’s new biographer, answers Bellow’s dying question: “Both.” Bellow was a jerk: Famously prickly and…
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Keeping a Close Watch on the Zombie Wars of Chicago
The Making of Zombie Wars By Aleksandar Hemon Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $26 Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel “The Making of Zombie Wars” is preceded by two epigraphs. The first, attributed to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, reads, “The mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the body endures.” The second…
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Why My Father Wouldn’t Let Me Read Marjorie Morningstar
When I was a young teenager in the late 1970s, my father forbade me to read “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk’s 1955 novel chronicling the eponymous Marjorie’s coming of age in the 1930s. Marjorie, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked their way out of the Bronx and to Manhattan’s Upper West Side,…
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Investigating Yavneh’s Bustling Drug Scene — from 3,000 Years Ago
Before the central Israeli town of Yavneh became a residence for police officers and IDF officers, it featured a varied drug scene, including many different kinds of intoxicants and hallucinogens. Long before. These substances were used 3,000 years ago, during the Iron Age, and were an integral part of culture and ritual for the Philistines,…
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Yiddish פֿאַר וואָס הערט מען ניט וועגן דעם גלעצנדיקן וווּקס פֿון דער ישׂראל־בערזע? Why aren’t we hearing about the dramatic growth of the Israeli stock market?
וואָלט דער אָפּרוף געווען אַנדערש, ווען דער ציל פֿון די טעראָריסטן וואָלט ניט געווען ייִדן, נאָר אַן אַנדער גרופּע?
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