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 an Ex-Hasid Can Teach You About Dating
Israel Irenstein is trying to explain chemistry. Neatly dressed in a grey suit and closely cropped hair, the 37-year-old dating coach stands before his all-female audience and addresses a young woman in the front row who is perplexed by a recent rejection. It had been a great first date. They laughed, they talked for hours,…
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Books Noam Chomsky and Bob Woodward on Osama Bin Laden Book List
The details on hundreds of letters, books, magazine articles, reports and other materials found in Al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden’s secret compound in Pakistan were declassified and released by the Obama administration. Among the documents released, which were taken from bin Laden’s compound by Navy SEALS after it was seized in May 2011, is an…
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Film & TV What If ‘Mad Max’ Were Jewish?
My name is Max Stein. My world is reduced to a single instinct: Survive. Well, that and find a decent mechanic. Who knew that maintaining a killer muscle car would be such a pain in the tuchus? If you know anyone reliable, please tell me. My current guy is a big overcharger. Also, he is…
The Latest
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Film & TV A Grim New Woody Allen Film Debuts at Cannes
After the earnest entreaties of Emmanuelle Bercot’s “Standing Tall,” the French social drama about at-risk youth that opened the festival, and the dystopian provocations of Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Lobster,” the mood at Cannes changed palpably when Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man” unspooled out-of-competition, injecting some adrenalin and existential angst (not to mention star power) into a…
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Remembering Robert Wistrich, Anti-Semitism’s Dauntless Foe
Robert Solomon Wistrich, who died in Rome on May 19 of a heart attack at age 70, was more than an eminent historian of anti-Semitism. As Neuburger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and head of its Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Wistrich drew on…
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Film & TV A Jewish ‘Ulysses’ at the Cannes Film Festival
It’s the 68th installment of the world’s most glamorous film festival, and thousands of filmmakers, actors, movie execs, journalists, tourists and adoring fans have descended on this small, surprisingly unremarkable town along the French Riviera, a town whose name is synonymous with cinema. Last Wednesday, the International Jury headed by the American directing duo The…
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How I Moved to L.A. Without Leaving New York While Becoming and Not Becoming a Father
The following essay appears in the forthcoming anthology “CHOICES: Why I Decided To Get Married Or Not And Have Children Or Not And Also I Am Half-White Or All-White Or Not White At All And May Or May Not Be Jewish.” The other day, as i sat on a bench at the park drinking wine…
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HomeLands: Building a Life Together
Kate Groob, 30, is an architect and project manager at Thomas A. Fenniman Architect, a restoration architecture firm in Manhattan. Her husband, Jason Groob, 32, is a data analyst at Sunday Sky, a data-driven video startup. They reside on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and have been living together for 6 years and their dog Baumer,…
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Natalie Portman Says Directing Debut Was Challenge
Natalie Portman played a ballerina in the grip of psychological trauma in “Black Swan,” but the Israeli actress said she had lots of support while directing her first film, about the childhood of Israeli intellectual Amos Oz, shown in Cannes. Portman both directs and stars in “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” based on Oz’s…
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Why Is a Formerly Secular Woman Like Her Running a Chabad Center?
At the age of 13, Keren Blum told her parents that she was an agnostic. Because she also became a vegetarian at that time, her parents, Conservative Jews, were troubled by what they perceived as rebelliousness. They tried to make Judaism joyous and meaningful for her — in vain, at least initially. Blum completed her…
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The Tragedy of Little Mae Berger
The neighborhood of Ghent in Norfolk, Virginia takes its name from a city in Belgium, and is now a chic historic district where restaurant menus highlight gluten-free dishes next to the fried green tomatoes. But 70 years ago, Ghent was a place where struggling Jewish immigrants, buoyed by a war-fueled economy, were able to buy…
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