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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What Bob Dylan Owes to Frank Sinatra — and Vice-Versa
In the summer of 1966, Frank Sinatra passed a baton to Bob Dylan. Not literally, of course: it’s hard to imagine, at that point in their lives, the two men being in the same physical space. Sinatra had been the most important figure in American popular music for twenty-five years: from his bobbysoxer days with…
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Rhode Island’s Best Spot to Find a Decent Corned Beef Sandwich May Be Doomed
By many measures, Jews have thrived in Rhode Island. Two have been elected to the state’s highest office, including the late Bruce Sundlun (governor from 1991 to 1995), whose resume also included a Purple Heart, a Légion d’Honneur from France and the Prime Minister’s Medal from Israel. Others have launched some of the state’s most…
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Bob Dylan, Known for Silence on Stage, Speaks for 40 Minutes at Tribute
(Reuters) — Bob Dylan, known for playing concerts with barely a word spoken to his audience, gave a lengthy speech on Friday at a gala in his honor where he chronicled the roots of his music while also praising and ribbing famous figures. The 73-year-old Dylan, considered by many musicians and critics to be the…
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Of Touro Synagogue, Hasbro and 10 Other Things About Jewish Rhode Island
1) Eighteen thousand and five hundred Jews live in Rhode Island — about 1.75% of the state’s population. 2) The central courtyard at Providence’s Roger Williams National Memorial was donated in 1931 by Jerome Hahn, in memory of his father, Isaac Hahn, the first Jewish citizen to hold elected office in the city. 3) Newport’s…
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Je Suis Dreyfus
Hardly a day goes by without France figuring prominently in the news. So widespread and insistent is this coverage that it calls to mind an earlier occasion in which goings-on in Paris seized hold of the American imagination. I refer, of course, to l’affaire Dreyfus. Then, as now, the latest technologies of information — postcards,…
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Was Helmut Schmidt ‘Contaminated by Nazi Ideology’
● Helmut Schmidt and the Crap War: the Biography from 1918 to 1945 By Sabine Pamperrien Piper Verlag, 352 pages, $25.36 Born in 1918, Helmut Schmidt, who served as chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, has been enjoying cultural prestige in his old age, in part for having recorded works by Bach and…
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Does ‘Ida’ Misrepresent Poland’s Treatment of Jews?
Every year since 1963, Poland has submitted a movie for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Nine of the country’s past submissions have been shortlisted for the prize, and 2015 marks the 10th: “Ida,” a black-and-white film about a Polish nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) who discovers she is Jewish and that her parents were…
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What’s Black and White and Jewish All Over?
● Your Face in Mine By Jess Row Riverhead Books, 384 pages, $27.95 On a warm Sunday in February, an unidentified black man approaches Kelly Thorndike as he walks through a parking lot in Baltimore on his way to shop for groceries at the local Asian market. When Kelly sees this man, he feels a…
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Animation, ‘Archer’ and the Art of Offending
At the beginning of the sixth and current season of “Archer,” an animated spy comedy on FX, the title character, a handsome, womanizing secret agent, is sent to the jungle of Borneo to recover the computer from a downed American spy plane. While making his way across the island, Archer runs into a Japanese soldier…
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Remembering Chicago Critic and Arts Maven Andrew Patner
Andrew Patner, the Chicago arts maven who died at age 55 on February 3, looked to Jewish elders for inspiration about what culture can signify. His “I. F. Stone: A Portrait” (1988) featured a sustained interview with the radical journalist born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia, ranging from current politics to ancient Greek civilization. Patner was…
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Anita Shapira Examines the Rise and Fall of David Ben-Gurion
Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel By Anita Shapira Yale University Press, 288 pages, $25 Another book on David Ben-Gurion? Many are the studies of the iconic Zionist leader — Shabtai Teveth’s massive and comprehensive political biography, “The Burning Ground,” is an analysis from the political center; Ben-Gurion confidant Michael Bar Zohar’s 1968 “Ben Gurion: The…
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