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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Columbus May Not Have Been First Jew in America
(Haaretz) — On August 3, 1492, just three days after the deadline given to Spain’s large and vibrant Jewish community to convert to Christianity or leave the country for ever, three ships – the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria – set sail from the port in Palos de la Frontera West. They were heading for the…
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Books Hit Man to Las Vegas Rabbi in ‘Gangsterland’
David Cohen’s the new rabbi at Temple Beth Israel in Las Vegas. He’s a learned guy who drops pearls of Torah wisdom for admiring congregants. And he’s overseeing both preschool and funerals for the growing shul. Oh, Rabbi Cohen’s also Sal Cupertine, a ruthless Chicago mafia hit man who’s had to assume a new identity…
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What’s an Angel of Rain Doing in a Jewish Sukkot Prayer?
The Israeli and Eastern Mediterranean climate is one of hot, rainless summers and — barring drought — cool, rainy winters, with spring and autumn as transitional seasons. This is why, though it has nothing to do with their own local weather (unless they’re living in Southern California), Jews all over the world pray briefly for…
The Latest
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Journalist Anne Sinclair Opens Up About Everything — Except DSK
‘I’m a woman, I’m French, I’m Jewish, I’m a journalist, and I’m the granddaughter of my grandfather.” Anne Sinclair, 66, sipping a cappuccino at the Peninsula Hotel on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue, says that she has many identities, and now wants to put together “the pieces of her origin.” In the francophone world, she is perhaps…
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Meet Maccabi Tel Aviv Star Sylven Landesberg
It is an exciting time to be part of the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team. In May, the team shocked the basketball world by winning the 2014 Euroleague Championship. Then in June, coach David Blatt was hired to be the new coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, where superstar LeBron James will play this upcoming season….
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For Patrick Modiano, Nazi Occupation Offers Rich Backdrop to Tales of Trial and Triumph
Although London’s betting parlors had claimed the odds-on favorites for this year’s Nobel Prize for literature were Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Japan’s Haruki Murakami, the choice of France’s Patrick Modiano was good news for Jewish readers. In awkward English, the Nobel Academy referred to Modiano’s obsession with wartime France as the “art of memory…
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What Does This Photo of Tashlikh Say About the Evolution of Jewish Life?
You have seen her before. She stands, swathed in white from tip to toe, on the walkway of a bridge, peering intently at the book she holds in her hands. She exudes a sense of solitariness, but she is not alone. A phalanx of men clad in black gather to her left. She is flanked…
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Books Patrick Modiano, French Sephardic Novelist, Wins Nobel for Literature
(Reuters) – Patrick Modiano, a Sephardic French novelist, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature as “a Marcel Proust of our time,” The Swedish Academy said on Thursday. French writer Patrick Modiano has won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature for works that made him “a Marcel Proust of our time” with tales often set…
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Himmler Documentary Reflects Evil of Banality
Hannah Arendt’s embattled phrase, “banality of evil,” describing Nazi master murderer Adolf Eichmann, may go a long way to illuminate his colleague in Hitler-era genocide, Heinrich Himmler. The documentary “The Decent One,” based on a cache of memorabilia including letters, diaries, and photos belonging to this proud Nazi, somehow private since the war, shows him…
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Meet the Yiddish-Speaking Grandmothers Who Retired as Amsterdam Prostitutes
Like many Jewish grandmothers, Martine and Louise Fokkens enjoy talking about their grandchildren in language laced with Yiddish. At 71, the twins from Amsterdam also paint, think often about the Holocaust and attend synagogue on Jewish holidays. But the Fokkens are not like most Jewish grandmothers. For one thing, they recently retired after 50 years…
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Books ‘How I Stopped’ Reading Shlomo Sand’s Crackpot Memoirs
How I Stopped Being a Jew By Shlomo Sand Verso, 112 pages, $16.95 ‘How I Stopped Being a Jew” is the strangest book that I have ever reviewed. I used to grant that distinction to the memoir by the psychic who claimed that aliens healed her anal cyst. But this one is even stranger. At…
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