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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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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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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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…
The Latest
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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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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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‘Mr. Kaplan’ Explores Uruguay’s Nazi Past Through Comedy
In 2009, when South American filmmaker Álvaro Brechner’s movie “Bad Day To Go Fishing” was accepted into the Warsaw Film Festival, he took the opportunity to visit the Polish neighborhood where his grandfather was born. Brechner’s grandparents had fled to South America just before World War II, with the family first settling in Bolivia before…
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The Joy of Gene Saks
Gene Saks, who died on March 28 at age 93, has understandably been chiefly identified for having helmed such Neil Simon hits as “Brighton Beach Memoirs,”; “Prisoner of Second Avenue”; “Last of the Red Hot Lovers”; and the screen versions of “The Odd Couple” and “Barefoot in the Park,”, among others. Yet Saks was more…
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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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