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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Of Eric Cantor, Dirty Dancing and 8 Other Things About (Jewish) Virginia
1) 95,520 Jews live in Virginia. 2) Congregation Beth Israel, built in 1882 in Charlottesville, is the oldest synagogue in the state. 3) Late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, who died in an airplane crash in 2002, was raised Jewish in Arlington. The Wellstone family name was originally Wexelstein. 4) Much of Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln”…
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The Mystery of Lebanon’s Maghen Abraham Synagogue
No one could quite believe it when the major political factions in Lebanon — including the anti-Israel Shi’a party Hezbollah — threw their support behind a million-dollar synagogue renovation project in Beirut in 2009. But if a public display of Lebanon’s Jewish past was what visionaries behind the yearlong, highly publicized restoration had in mind…
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Bring on the Portable Shabbat
Jewish funding organizations have long been investing in Israel trips, day school, summer camp, and, more recently, children’s books. And now, thanks to grants from the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life and the Paul E. Singer Foundation, young adults can secure funds to execute an age-old weekly Jewish ritual: hosting Shabbat dinners. Called OneTable, the…
The Latest
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POEM: The Blessed Alphabet
Blessed landlords of the language Blessed era of the language Blessed villages of the language Bless the child on a winter’s-eve In the town, who learns the language in all her chapters her genealogies, her nuances, her grammar Blessed people of the language who fought For her, as a minority, bless he who totters with…
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When Hank Greenberg Went to War
The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII By John Klima Thomas Dunne Books, 432 pages, $27.99 On December 5, 1941, Hank Greenberg walked out of Michigan’s Fort Custer Training Center a free man. Seven months earlier, he had become the first…
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Film & TV Do Marvel Movies Have an Anti-Semitism Problem?
It seems like I can’t go a day without reading about how anti-Semitism is on the rise—not just in Europe but also in the U.S. Sadly this is an attitude reflected in our own geek culture — specifically in the anti-Semitism found in X-Men and Marvel movie universe. Let’s start with the X-Men movies. Magneto,…
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Ezra Mendelsohn Expressed Hope in Humanity’s Potential
The historian Ezra Mendelsohn, who has died of cancer at the age of 74, infused esthetics into the study of Jewish history to an unusual degree. As Rachel & Michael Edelman professor emeritus of European Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, he produced compelling books in which modern Jewish history is informed by…
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Art 12 Unforgettable Images by Forgotten Jewish Cartoonists
For every Al Hirschfeld — whose splashy retrospective just opened at the New York Historical Society — there’s a Sam Berman or Alan Jedla, star caricaturists whose fortunes faded along with the glory days of newspaper cartooning. But Drew Friedman and Stephen Kroninger won’t let them disappear. In fact, they conjured the artists on May…
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Art Meet Chicago’s $500 Million Art Man
“Natürlich.” When asked if he collected things as a child, Stefan Edlis replied in impeccable German. Of course he did. “I was a stamp collector,” said Edlis, 89, industrialist and art collector, who recently donated over 40 works of art to the Art Institute of Chicago together with his wife, Gael Neeson, making it the…
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My Venetian Bar Mitzvah
In Venice, my wife and I like to stay in the old ghetto, which sits in ideal proximity to sundry picturesque attractions, yet somehow feels insulated and tucked away. My hunch is that the neighborhood’s name, despite its antiquated origin, keeps away the riffraff. “This is where your people used to live,” my wife, Francesca,…
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Art Was This Really Television’s Golden Age?
Halfway through my visit to the Jewish Museum, someone thought to turn down the Barbra Streisand. Or maybe I just got used to it. Either way, it was a blessing. For, the sound of Babs belting out the Peter Matz tune “Gotta Move,” from her 1966 CBS TV special, “Color Me Barbra,” threatened to drown…
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Music He may be country music royalty, but his heart belongs to Leonard Cohen
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Opinion I run The Jewish Theological Seminary. Here’s the real story about President Isaac Herzog speaking at our commencement
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Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point