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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Janet Hadda, Biographer of I.B. Singer, Dies at 69
Janet Ruth Hadda — Yiddish professor, psychoanalyst, and biographer — died in Los Angeles on June 23, 2015. She was 69. The cause was metastatic cancer. Dr. Hadda was born December 23, 1945, the daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany, Dr. George and Annemarie (Kohn) Hadda. Her grandfather was Dr. Siegmund Hadda, the last Director…
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Remembering Janet Hadda Whose Spirit and Scholarship Endure
I will always remember Janet Hadda as the petite and tenacious woman who gave the Hebrew University professor Khone Shmeruk a run for his money. Those who knew her from the YIVO building on Fifth Avenue and 86th Street (Dina Abramowicz, Shoshke Erlich, Mikhl Herzog, Bina Weinreich) weren’t at all surprised that she could hold…
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Film & TV HBO’s Larry Kramer Doc Isn’t Just Good. It’s Important.
It wasn’t so long ago that gay men were vilified by American society at large. Back in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic surfaced, priests railed against them, claiming the disease was God’s revenge for sinful lifestyle choices. That, of course, has changed — mostly. While there are still regular examples of anti-gay sentiments (and…
The Latest
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The Taxonomy of the Jewish Casket
“One of the traditions is that everybody is equal in death, so you would think that all Jewish people would go in a pine box. However, we make a lot of very nice high-end caskets,” explains Lou Tobia Jr., the third generation owner of the New England Casket Company in Boston. Almost half of his…
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Jewish Pimp Sentenced to 10 Years in Sing Sing
100 Years Ago Jewish pimp Louis Rosenberg was sentenced to a 10-year stint in Sing Sing prison after he was busted for selling a 17-year-old girl to another pimp for $25. It turned out, however, that the other pimp was actually a police detective, and the madam involved was a settlement house worker. Rosenberg met…
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Music Berlin Philharmonic Names First Jewish Music Director
On June 22, it was announced that the musicians of the celebrated Berlin Philharmonic (BPO) have elected their first-ever Jewish music director, the Russian maestro Kirill Petrenko. Not only was this choice ground-breaking, it was an indirect response to another job candidate, the German conductor Christian Thielemann whose right-wing politics and anti-immigrant feelings seemed to…
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Art Jules Feiffer Makes It Look Easy
The first time I saw the way Jules Feiffer drew a line, I was captivated. I was at the School of Visual Arts’ library, reading his Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice strips, and his figures always seemed caught in midmovement, about to jump off the page with electric energy. Prose and drawings seemed effortlessly paired, and…
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Beauty Is Always Skin Deep at Israel’s Tattoo Convention
Wandering around Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood the day of the third annual Israel Tattoo Convention, I figured I would encounter a trail of tattooed people who would lead me there. But inked Israelis were on every street corner and coffee shop; I couldn’t quite determine whom to follow. “In Tel Aviv, in the south, every…
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‘Beautiful Minutiae’ in Los Angeles
Laura Nicole Diamond, 46, is a . Her husband, Christopher Heisen, 45, runs an educational technology company, Educational Assessments Corp. The two live in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles with their 18-year-old foster daughter, Maria, and their two sons, Aaron, 14, and Emmett, 10. In August, Laura and Christopher will have been married…
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William Shemin Gets His Medal of Honor — a Century Later
About a year ago I got a phone call out of the blue from a woman who was breathless with excitement over an article I had written for Hadassah magazine about the Jewish experience in World War I. “Do you have a minute?” she asked, identifying herself as 85-year-old Elsie Shemin Roth of St. Louis….
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My Daughter, the Catholic Rabbi
This is the second spring that two robins became parents in a tight little nest woven on the lintel above our front door. Last year, when the nest came down, all that was left were shards of baby-blue eggs. I stood for a long time, wondering if it is sacrilegious to throw out the remains,…
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News Why do some people think Mike Lawler is Jewish?
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Art At the Venice Biennale, protests, self-mutilation and rage against Israel and Russia. Is anyone left to talk about the art?