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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The Hasidim of Brooklyn Are Ready for Their Close-Up
The art at the Brooklyn Public Library branch on Grand Army Plaza just got a little more frum and a little more Japanese. Through February, the library is featuring a black and white photo exhibit depicting the life and rituals of Crown Heights’ Chabad Lubavitch hasidim. The exhibit, entitled “The Hasidim of Crown Heights, Brooklyn;…
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8 Facts About Jewish Missouri
1. Approximately 59,000 Jews live in Missouri. 2. Mark Twain’s relationship with Jews in Missouri was complicated. The Levys were the only Jewish family in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. As a kid, Twain joined other kids in his community in hazing the Levy kids. Only later in life did he become something of a…
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The Only Thing Worth Working For, Worth Fighting For, Worth Dying For
● Palestine in Turmoil: The Struggle for Sovereignty, 1933-1939 By Monty Penkower, Touro College Press, 348 pages, $39 Monty Noam Penkower, in the latest of his fine works on the genesis of the State of Israel, examines in detail the history of 1930s Palestine. But counterintuitively, Penkower’s context for “Palestine in Turmoil: The Struggle for…
The Latest
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Books Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Author
● Not that Kind of Girl By Lena Dunham Random House, 265 Pages, $28 I like Lena Dunham. I liked “Delusional Downtown Divas,” her web series for Index Magazine. I liked “Tiny Furniture,” her 2010 film. And I like “Girls” (except for that one episode at the end of the first season when Jessa married…
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Books Throwback Thursday: Novellas About Sexy Tel Aviv
Regina Kolitz // Copyright Forward Association Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Publisher Heinrich H. Glanz created the Juedisch-Politische Bibliothek [Jewish-Political] series of books in Vienna before it was “confiscated” after Nazi Anschluss in 1938. After emigrating to…
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Neil Diamond’s 32nd Album Is His Best in 40 Years
Sometime back in 1986, it finally dawned on me that Neil Diamond might actually be cool. This wasn’t the easiest or most logical conclusion to come to, having spent so much of my elementary and high school years cowering amid the bombastic onslaught of “Longfellow Serenade,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” (his wrist-slittingly maudlin divorce-rock…
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The Foodlums of Connecticut
One Sunday this past August, I stopped by the farmers’ market in Morris, Connecticut. Morris is a small town (population about 2,400) in lush, hilly Litchfield County. It’s probably best known as the home of luxury resort Winvian, and its main intersections are governed only by a stop sign or a single red flashing light….
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How Jill Soloway Created ‘Transparent’ — the Jewiest Show Ever
On its face, “Transparent” is a television series about a transgender father coming out to his three young adult children. It weaves together the tragicomic family dynamics of five unbelievably narcissistic people. It is also arguably the Jewiest television show ever. Sure, lots of television shows have featured Jewish characters. In long-running series like “Seinfeld,”…
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‘Klinghoffer’ Protesters United Against ‘Anti-Semitic’ Opera
On the first crisp night of fall, about a thousand people — many of them in wheelchairs — gathered outside the Metropolitan Opera to protest the opening night of John Adams’s opera “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Both sides of Broadway between 63rd and 68th street were closely secured by NYPD officers and some of their…
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Books The Soviet Pastoral of David Bezmozgis
● THE BETRAYERS By David Bezmozgis Little, Brown, 240 pages, $26 David Bezmozgis’s slim new novel, “The Betrayers,” seems at first deceptively simple, then, at second glance, deceptively complex. Set against a historical and political background that becomes too heavy a burden to bear on its slender scaffolding, it is the story of a noble…
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When ‘Klinghoffer’ Played the Heartland
The production of “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the Metropolitan Opera has caused a storm of anger among Jewish leaders and laypeople. Protests have drawn hundreds of Jews to the Met, and top New York Jewish leaders met with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, urging him to cancel the opera. Major Jewish groups, including…
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Yiddish די ייִדישע גאַסנשילד פֿונעם פּאַריזער „פּלעצל“ איז צוגעגנבֿעט געוואָרןYiddish street sign for the Pletzel, the Yiddish quarter of Paris, is stolen
דער אינצידענט איז פֿאָרגעקומען בעת אַ ממשותדיקן וווּקס פֿון אַנטיסעמיטיזם אין פֿראַנקרײַך
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