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 Rocky Rise of J Street
There’s no doubt that J Street has shaken up American Jewry. Since its inception in 2008 as a lobby, political action committee, educational group and student movement, the organization has disrupted the debate about what it means to be pro-Israel. Now a new documentary, “J Street: The Art of the Possible,” produced and directed by…
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Madeleine Kunin Never Felt Anti-Semitism in Vermont — but Switzerland Was Different Story
The only whiff of anti-Semitism that I experienced during my campaign for governor of Vermont took the form of a reporter’s question. He asked my campaign manager Liz Bankowski: “How are you going to deal with Madeleine Kunin’s liabilities?” “What liabilities?” Liz asked. “Well, she’s a woman, a democrat and she’s Jewish.” Liz thought for…
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How Wendy Wasserstein and Heidi Holland Remade the World
tk “It’s just that I feel stranded,” says Heidi Holland, standing alone on stage, delivering a frustrated, funny speech about her life and its discontents. It’s 1986, she’s nearing 40, and she’s addressing an alumnae gathering of her all-girls high school. For the last hour or so, we’ve watched her grow up, along with the…
The Latest
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Jerusalem Cinematheque and Film Festival Founder Lia Van Leer Dies at 90
Lia van Leer, who died on March 13 at age 90, was a mighty pioneer who ensured that future generations in Israel will appreciate film as an art form. Founder of the Haifa Cinematheque, the Jerusalem Cinematheque, the Israel Film Archive and the Jerusalem Film Festival, she was born Lia Greenberg in the Russian-speaking Bessarabian…
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Delving Into the FBI’s Jewish Files
The Federal Bureau of Investigation arranges its online Freedom of Information Act archive by name, organization and topic. Or, to put that another way, from “Al Capone” to “Walter Elias Disney,” “ACLU” to “Zionist Organization of America” and “Animal Mutilation” to “White Supremacist Groups.” There is no catchall file for “Jews” in the archive, which…
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Not Your Bubbe’s Brooklyn
Brooklynite Book by Michael Mayer and Peter Lerman Music and Lyrics by Peter Lerman Vineyard Theatre This theatrical season has seen not one but two musicals about superheroes in Brooklyn. The first, Itamar Moses, Michael Friedman and Daniel Aukin’s “The Fortress of Solitude,” which was mounted by the Public Theater in the fall, was a…
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Here’s Who Should Watch ‘The Cobbler’
“The Cobbler,” the recently released movie directed by Tom McCarthy starring Adam Sandler as (obviously, Jewish) cobbler Max Simkin, who discovers a stitching machine with magical powers in his basement, has received dismal reviews — 7% on Rotten Tomatoes and a whopping 5.7 out of 10 rating on Internet Movie Database. Oh well, you might…
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The Women Who Would Be (Carole) King
On the last day of the second coldest February in Chicago’s history, I made my way downtown to the Actors’ Equity Building on Randolph Street to gate-crash the auditions for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” If you’ve never been to an audition of this kind, you’d probably expect something out of the movies: a bare…
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What Was a Nice Jewish Girl Like Her Doing in a Church Like This?
At the border of the town where I grew up there is a circle that straddles Maryland and the District of Columbia and is ringed by a band of churches. Catholic, Protestant, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist. All are represented here, I remember being told many times. Many of the girls in my town wore the Catholic…
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Of Ben and Jerry’s, Maple Syrup, Bernie Sanders and 8 Other Things About Jewish Vermont
1) 5,285 Jews live in Vermont. 2) The interior of the so-called Lost Shul of Burlington (better known as the Chai Adam synagogue) was painted in 1910 by Ben Zion Black and is currently in the process of being restored. 3) In 1977, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield opened the first Ben & Jerry’s Homemade…
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How Man Ray Drew on Math, Shakespeare — and Shoah
From 1934 to 1935, at Paris’s Institut Henri Poincaré, surrealist artist Man Ray photographed dusty mathematical models, which he said he found baffling. But the Philadelphia native, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, had to abandon the photos when he fled the Nazis for Hollywood. In 1946, he returned to Paris and retrieved the photos; two years later,…
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