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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Michigan Opera Director Turns His Hand to Yiddish Theater
“You can’t dance at two weddings with one tukhes,” goes the old Yiddish saying. Tell that to Michael Yashinsky, a 26-year-old Detroit area Yiddishist who divides his time between a Jewish day school and Michigan Opera Theatre. Yashinsky, whose showbiz lineage includes grandparents who were professional actors and an uncle who was a rock star,…
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Film & TV The Jewish Identity of Madeline Kahn
For a long time, starting just after her fiftieth birthday, Madeline Kahn did something eight times a week that she’d never done even once before: she lit Sabbath candles. As Gorgeous Teitelbaum in Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Sisters Rosensweig” (1992–93), Madeline had to connect with a Jewish heritage about which she knew little. She’d grown up…
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Film & TV Their Fathers, The Murderers
Every family history has dark periods. But how do you come to terms with the knowledge that your father is a notorious mass murderer? “A Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did,” a 90-minute documentary that had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, tackles this issue with great depth and sensitivity. It…
The Latest
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Art New York’s Museum of Biblical Art Closes
New York City is losing its Museum of Biblical Art. The Board of Trustees of MOBIA announced that it will close for good on June 30 this year. Its current exhibition, Sculpture in the Age of Donatello, will remain open to the public through June 14. This comes about a year after the American Bible…
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Film & TV How Iris Apfel Became a 93-Year-Old Style Icon
Iris Apfel is not your bubbe’s bubbe. But by the end of the documentary “Iris,” you’ll wish she was yours. Apfel, a spunky 93, has spent a lifetime successfully navigating the fine line between eccentric and icon. She mixed charity goods from flea markets with designer clothes to create looks that made her a fashion…
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How 9 Objects Tell Story of Early Jewish Philadelphia
Against the backdrop of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the National Museum of American Jewish History describes the Jewish immigrant experience: the lure of freedom and economic opportunity, struggles against poverty and prejudice, the balancing act between tradition and assimilation. Here are men and women who took risks, made discoveries, survived hardships and pioneered…
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Art How Ann Weiss Restored Humanity to the Victims of Auschwitz
In October of 1986, as a delegation of Jews active in community affairs toured a closed Auschwitz-Birkenau, investigative journalist Ann Weiss fell behind the others. “A need for solitude compelled me to linger behind, Weiss said of confronting 30,000 shoes that once belonged to prisoners. “Alone, I studied their broken forms, and thought of their…
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Film & TV Can You Imagine Your Friend Dying? Try Filming It Over and Over Again.
Over the past three years, filmmaker Josh Seftel has filmed a murder, a suicide and a stroke. He has filmed obesity, loneliness, homelessness and alcoholism. And a sad birthday party or two. The subject of these scenes is always the same: photographer Philip Toledano, who plagued by fears of his own mortality, decided to create…
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A Personal History of Sports and Anti-Semitism
I thought about sports and anti-Semitism after reading about an extraordinarily ugly incident at a recent Dutch soccer game. And I realized that in my 44-year career at The New York Times, covering about 8,000 events, I personally witnessed only two such moments. And I wrote about only one other. I never was the object…
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A Pogrom Against Warsaw’s Jews
1915 • 100 Years Ago Yente Telebende, a regular Forverts character created by B. Kovner, chimed in on the death of the great writer I.L. Peretz. When Telebende saw the photograph of Peretz on the cover of the Forverts, she clicked her tongue, clapped her hands together and yelled out: “What? Your shoshalists got another…
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A Girl is Born in Brownsville
1915 • 100 Years Ago A young man from Amboy Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn came bounding into the offices of the Forverts to tell the editors an odd story about a set of parents tricked by their newborn baby. When the baby was born, it entered the wide world with such a…
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