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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Books
What Should We Call Gary Shteyngart’s Next Book?
Gary Shteyngart from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo. Calling Gary Shteyngart fans! This is your chance to leave your imprint on American Russian Jewish literature. The author just celebrated a big success with his latest memoir “Little Failure,” which won him a Top 5 spot in this year’s Forward 50 list. But this is also…
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Ayad Akhtar’s ‘Disgraced’ Raises Profound Issues About Dual Loyalty
Amir Kapoor is a guy you know, maybe went to college with. His parents were born in India — or was it Pakistan? — and he grew up in a devout Muslim-American family. He went to college, then to law school; along the way he abandoned his faith, and now he’s a corporate lawyer at…
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Aside From That, Mrs. Klinghoffer, How Did You Like the Opera?
‘So, you went to see ‘The Death of Klinghoffer,’ right?” “Uh-huh.” “Can I ask you something?” That was my mother on the phone. She had been watching a rebroadcast of “Charlie Rose: The Week” where two lawyers, Martin Garbus and Floyd Abrams, were debating the hubbub surrounding the Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Adams and…
The Latest
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Forward 50 2014 Gary Shteyngart
“What’s funny is that I’m not self-hating at all. I like myself quite a bit,” Gary Shteyngart, 42, told the Forward’s Yevgeniya Traps earlier this year. Luckily, despite the self-loathing that the author, humorist and star of book trailers (featuring his former student James Franco) affects in his comic persona, Shteyngart is not alone in…
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10 Facts About Jewish California
1. California had 1,223,640 Jews in 2012. This is the second highest number of Jews in the country (only behind New York) and 18% of the entire Jewish population in the U.S. 2. MGM Studios and Paramount Pictures, two of the largest Hollywood film studios in history, were founded by Jews. Marcus Loew started MGM…
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Music At 97, Holocaust Survivor Plays Lincoln Center
97-year-old Emily Kessler shows off her mandolin technique / Courtesy When Emily Kessler escaped the Nazis, she stopped enjoying the music she used to sing with her parents in pre-war Ukraine. But after 40 years, Kessler finally returned to the songs she loved so much. Since then, she hasn’t stopped. Now, this 97-year-old Holocaust survivor…
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Of Trains, Tea and Translation
I’ve loved train travel ever since I was a small child. For the summer trips we made from Moscow to visit Tuapse, a town on the shore of the Black Sea where my grandparents lived, I shared a four-berth compartment with my parents. We would eat boiled eggs, tomatoes and cucumbers we had packed, discuss…
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Books How the Birth Control Pill Changed Everything
Jonathan Eig is The New York Times best-selling author of “Luckiest Man,” “Opening Day,” “Get Capone,” and now, “The Birth of the Pill,” about the race to produce the birth control pill. Before writing books, Eig worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Chicago magazine, The Dallas Morning News and the Times-Picayune. He…
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The Spookiest Jewish Museum on the Planet
Brooches and wreaths made of carefully coiled human hair. Images of life-size, ultra-realistic models of dead, naked women — their supine bodies arranged in what look like post-coital poses, but with their abdomens sliced open and organs spilling out. Death masks hundreds of years old that look like people standing next to you. This is…
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Channeling Freud To Prevent the Next Barry Freundel
(Haaretz) — I was sitting in a group discussion with fellow psychotherapists recently when a colleague mentioned that one of his female patients had, unannounced, come over and sat down on his lap. Someone else shared the revelation that one of his female patients intimated a desire to see him without any clothes on. The therapists…
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Utopian Dream of Israel Dies in ‘Salt of the Earth’
Some sand, some buckets, a few brooms, some paper cut outs, a handful of toy cars, trucks and tanks, a kieg light, a video camera hooked up to a live feed, and a single puppet. This is all Zvi Sahar and his Puppet/Cinema team of precision performers require to tell a story that encompasses all…
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Yiddish וואַנטבילדער אין וואַרשע באַערן ייִדישע ליטעראַטן בעת היסטאָרישע ייִדישע ערטער פֿאַרשווינדן Warsaw’s murals honor Yiddish writers, as its historic Jewish sites disappear
די ענדערונגען בײַם „אוישוויץ־מוזיי“ שאַפֿן אַ באַזונדערע פּראָבלעם פֿאַר עלטערע לײַט
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Fast Forward Emma Stone, Jonathan Glazer join growing list of Hollywood figures boycotting Israeli film institutions
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