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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An Unlikely Ghost Story From David Cronenberg
In “Maps to the Stars,” the latest creep-show from Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, Benjie Weiss, a 13-year-old child actor, starts seeing dead people. First it’s Cammy, a girl with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma whom he met in a hospital on a “Make a Wish”-type visit, and who shows up outside of his bedroom wearing a spectral bridal…
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All The Yiddish That’s Fit To Print in Easthampton, Massachusetts
Who knew that we loved to listen to the air? Until the death of analogue music we never realized we craved the warmth of vinyl’s atmospheric cracklings, but in 2014 record sales spiked 49%. And so it is with printing. Once we no longer rely for our news on swathes of newsprint hurtling through factories…
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How Marvin Miller Led Players Union and Changed Baseball Forever
Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary By Robert F. Burk University of Illinois Press, 352 pages, $35 This stately, well-researched study raises the question of which is more enduring, anti-Semitic hatred or the loathing — even after death — felt by plutocrats forced against their will to treat their workers fairly. Robert F. Burk, an emeritus professor…
The Latest
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‘Woman in Gold’ Success Shows German Preoccupation With Nazi Past
(JTA) — Two starkly different images: a woman wrapped in shimmering gold, a man whipped and bleeding on a cold cement floor. The first, a 1907 painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, is the centerpiece of “Woman in Gold,” a film starring Helen Mirren that had its world premiere last week at the Berlinale International…
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Boston’s Vilna Shul Connects Present With the Past
On a Sunday morning in late November, around 250 people fill the dark brown wooden pews of the Vilna Shul in Boston. A synagogue built by Jewish immigrants from Lithuania in 1919 on Phillips Street in the central Beacon Hill neighborhood, it closed in 1985, and then reopened as a cultural center in the early…
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Books Why Ayelet Tsabari’s Sami Rohr Win Is a Victory for Arab Jews
Sami Rohr Prize winner Ayelet Tsabari / Elsin Davidi Ayelet Tsabari, author of the short story collection “The Best Place On Earth” (HarperCollins 2013), has won the prestigious Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature — and I couldn’t be happier about it. A couple of months ago, I issued one of those pre-New-Year’s calls for…
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Ayelet Tsabari Wins Sami Rohr Prize
Ayelet Tsabari, author of “The Best Place On Earth,” is the winner of the 2015 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Tsabari takes home $100,000 for winning the prize, which was announced Monday. The collection of short stories explores Israeli history through the eyes of Mizrahi characters. “I grew up not seeing myself and my…
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Of Brandeis, Mr. Spock and 10 Other Facts About Jewish Massachusetts
1) Massachusetts has a Jewish population of roughly 278,000, accounting for 4.2% of the state population (which is twice the national average), and 4.1% of the total Jewish population in the United States. 2) Solomon Franco, a merchant who arrived from Holland in 1649, is Boston’s first recorded Jewish resident. However, he was not allowed…
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How Family Holocaust Stories Became Multimedia Art Exhibit
A version of this article appeared in Yiddish here. Children of Holocaust survivors can be split into two groups: those whose parents or grandparents said nothing about those harrowing years, and those whose relatives gave them detailed accounts of their experiences. I belong to the first category. Although my father’s family had, like all the…
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A Nacht at the Opera in Berlin
On a freezing January evening, a large crowd gathered to watch as three stolpersteine were hammered into the sidewalk outside the Komische Oper Berlin. These brass stones commemorate victims — mostly, but not all, Jewish — of Nazi persecution. The plaques laid in front of the opera commemorated Jews who were involved there before the…
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Herman Rosenblat, Penned Fake Shoah Memoir, Dies at 85
Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor who created a scandal by writing a memoir filled with untrue details, has died. Rosenblat died on Feb. 5 and was buried three days later in Hollywood, Fla., The Associated Press reported. He was 85. He created an uproar with his 2008 memoir “Angel at the Fence” with the claim…
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