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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‘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…
The Latest
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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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The Boys of Buchenwald
The black-and-white photos on display couldn’t be more different. There’s Izio Rosenman, a young boy, held by his mother at a family picnic. Next to this 1937 photo we see Izio in a hammock with his two sisters. He seems content. In the other photo, Janek Szlajtsztajn and David Perlmutter sit behind the barbed wire…
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’50 Shades’ of Meh
At 8 p.m. on Sunday night, I took my seat at “50 Shades Of Grey” in the back row, like a guy in a trenchcoat at a Times Square spank-room circa 1977. To further accentuate that feeling, the Alamo Drafthouse — the only place I’ll see movies in Austin — had a custom pre-show made…
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Philip Levine Was Working-Class Poet Inspired by Yiddishkeit
Philip Levine, the Jewish poet who died on February 14 at age 87, was a feisty writer inspired by working class roots and a family tradition of bubbe-meises (grandmother’s fables). In “Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections” (2000) Levine analysed his poem “The Old Testament”: “My twin brother swears that at age thirteen I’d…
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