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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Pain and Ponce Are Deli’s Main Ingredients
As you enter the narrow doorway of Brooklyn’s Pearlstein + Dung, the first thing that greets you is the sparse shtetl décor and the pungent odor of artisanal cuisine. With furnishings based on drawings from a crumbling book in Slovakian synagogue basement, the shop is the brainchild of Ari and Zounette Pearlstein. Ari strokes his…
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Vaccination Comes From Cows and Jews
I have chosen to soil the sabbatical year — to put the shit into Shmita — by announcing that this will be my final Phil O’Lologous column. After producing 7,618 — or exactly a Dyson Number — of columns, I will retire to my dictionaries, my tomes and my vellum to practice cunning linguistics alone….
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Jew Hatred, the New Euro Retro Chic?
One of the hottest new trends in Europe is also one of the oldest — attacking Jews. And the energy driving this throwback can be traced to some of Europe’s newest residents, as Islamist immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East are taking up a tradition of their new home and making it their…
The Latest
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‘MikiLeaks’ Reveals New NSA Spying Scandal
Rabbi Barry Freundel, who has pled guilty to 52 counts of voyeurism, has revealed that he was recruited as part of a government surveillance program called “MikiLeaks.” The program, run by the National Security Agency, targeted Jewish ritual baths, known as mikvehs, to collect evidence of individuals peeing in the mikveh. Freundel’s claims were backed…
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The Amazing Grace of Leonard Nimoy
I often called him Leib, his Yiddish name, picking up on the term of endearment used by his wife, Susan. We were friends for more than 25 years, the trailing spouses of the even longer friendship between our wives. I was not a Trekkie (or Trekker, to use the term Leonard preferred). I didn’t watch…
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Cancer-Stricken Israeli Playwright Finds Comedy in Disease
Producer Daniel Krupnik and his wife, translator Hilla Bar, first encountered “Happy Ending”in April 2014, when they saw a photograph in an Israeli newspaper accompanying an article about Anat Gov’s musical play. The picture depicted a woman dancing hand-in-hand with a man dressed as a crab. Not long afterwards, they decided to translate and adapt…
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Of Rosanne Barr, King David Kalakaua and 9 Other Things About Jewish Hawaii
1) Seven thousand two hundred and eighty Jews live in Hawaii. 2) One of the earliest documented appearances of a Jew in the Hawaiian islands occurred in 1798, when a sailor named Ebenezer Townsend, Jr. recorded that the Hawaiian king came aboard a whaling ship with a cook belonging to the Mosaic faith. 3) Jewish…
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Irving Kahn, Oldest Money Manager, Dies at 109
Irving Kahn, the American Jewish money manager who died on Thursday, February 26, at age the age of 109, was more than just the oldest living investment professional, as he was often dubbed. Kahn exemplified a work ethic which stressed ever-fresh intellectual interests as a way to remain young in spirit. Always on the lookout…
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The Occupations and Preoccupations of Arkadi Zaides
In the video clip, a Jewish boy of no more than 12, seemingly drunk on Purim wine and missing a shoe, kicks and slaps the exterior of a Palestinian home in Hebron. A man in a kippah, perhaps the boy’s father, appears and drags the boy away. The man turns to a soldier off camera…
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An Unlikely Ghost Story From David Cronenberg
In “Maps to the Stars,” the latest creep-show from Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, Benjie Weiss, a 13-year-old child actor, starts seeing dead people. First it’s Cammy, a girl with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma whom he met in a hospital on a “Make a Wish”-type visit, and who shows up outside of his bedroom wearing a spectral bridal…
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All The Yiddish That’s Fit To Print in Easthampton, Massachusetts
Who knew that we loved to listen to the air? Until the death of analogue music we never realized we craved the warmth of vinyl’s atmospheric cracklings, but in 2014 record sales spiked 49%. And so it is with printing. Once we no longer rely for our news on swathes of newsprint hurtling through factories…
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