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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Romance Novel About Nazi Guard and Concentration Camp Inmate Has Everyone Angry
(JTA) — German thinker Theodor Adorno famously stated that it’s barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, but he said nothing about romance novels. For author Kate Breslin, the Holocaust apparently provided just the right amount of narrative tension for her new book “For Such a Time,” inspired by the Book of Esther. The novel, which…
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Music A-Wa’s Unlikely Journey From Rural Israel to Global Fame
A trio of sisters wearing hot pink hijabs piles into a dusty white Jeep and rambles across the desert. At home in the village, a man with a closely-cropped white beard shaded by his military cap whips a lash upon the cracked, sandy ground, while an elderly woman with sunken eyes and gold-painted fingernails puffs…
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Sketching Life With a Rare Disease
Mindy Indy sits in her apartment, head bent over a large piece of sketch paper, carefully outlining a young boy’s glasses with her ink pen. She’s already penciled out the scene — two teens sitting on a porch, as the boy tries in earnest to explain the symptoms he experiences from familial dysautonomia, a Jewish…
The Latest
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Move Over ‘Project Runway.’ Here Comes Israel’s ‘Skin Wars’
(JTA) — The world of reality TV is vast and scary, and I know because I watch way too much of it. But there are surprising gems to be found, and Game Show Network’s is one of them. Currently in its second season, the reality competition show is modeled after “Project Runway,” but instead of fashion-design…
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What ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ and Jon Stewart Have in Common
Shofar-dick fights aside (yes, that’s crossing shofars held at crotch-level), there’s nothing really new about “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp.” But that’s why it works so well! Of course, the jokes are new, with gems like an incoherent “Starlight Express”-like musical, a token Israeli counselor who’s into threesomes and yurt-living, and a…
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We Bought an Average Farm in New Jersey. Or So We Thought.
We were having our Shabbat dinner at “the farm” when, after finishing the chicken soup with lockshen, the poultry dish arrived. My sister Lenore stabbed what she thought was the weekly roast chicken and screamed out, “Henrietta!” Henrietta was our pet duck. Ours was not a working New Jersey farm, but a summer vacation spot…
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Art Crossing Borders in Palestinian Contemporary Art
The Umm el-Fahem Gallery, dedicated to exhibiting contemporary Palestinian and Arab art, contains an archive seemingly at odds with its mission. It features the photographs and life histories of some 300 of the town’s oldest inhabitants, most of them already dead. But these stories were sacred to the Gallery’s founder and director, Said Abu Shakra,…
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Rediscovering the Judeo-Spanish Language
Born in Paris in 1950, Dominique Vidal is a French author and journalist specializing in the Middle East, the Holocaust, far-right-wing European politics and related issues. A contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, he has co-written “The New A-Z of the Middle East,” among other books. He is the son of Haïm Vidal Sephiha, a Judeo-Spanish…
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How I Gained an Unlikely Love for Torah — And a Guatemalan Daughter
I never planned on becoming a Torah study regular, and the last thing I expected was that attending Torah study would lead me to adopt an “unaccompanied minor” from Guatemala. Yet that’s what happened. While many Americans are moving away from religious affiliation, my increased connection to Judaism through weekly Torah study has strengthened my…
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Music The Secret Jewish History of James Taylor
This past June, James Taylor finally achieved a feat that had eluded the folk-pop singer-songwriter for the past 45 years or so: His new album, “Before This World,” shot to No. 1 in its first week of release. The last time the folk-rock singer-songwriter approached the top of Billboard’s album charts was in 1971 when…
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POEM: ALIBI
This past week, news of a stabbing attack on marchers in Jerusalem’s Gay Pride parade, which left 16-year-old Shira Banki dead, and an arson attack that killed Palestinian toddler Ali Dawabsha, circulated through news and social media channels in Israel and abroad. The following poem by the Israeli poet Eli Eliahu appeared on his public…
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