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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6 Things About Jewish New Mexico
Fancy some green chili in your matzo brei on Passover? Then you should go to New Mexico. Here are six things about Jewish New Mexico you should know. 1) New Mexico is home to many of the last crypto-Jews, who claim that their ancestors fled to Mexico during the Spanish Inquisition to escape persecution. Over…
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Indie Rock With A Spiritual Core
The Antlers are a Brooklyn-based indie rock band best known for their intense 2009 opus “Hospice,” a concept album about a terminally ill child in a cancer ward. However, to label the group as “sad rock” would be to underestimate their talent. Prior to “Hospice,” The Antlers was singer Peter Silberman’s solo project. He released…
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The Jewish Life and Times of Nadine Gordimer
The South African Jewish author Nadine Gordimer, who died on Sunday, July 13, at age 90, expressed an even-handed humanism throughout her literary career. This is far from the case for every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which Gordimer was accorded in 1991. Her scrupulous sense of fairness, which motivated her to oppose…
The Latest
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Music The Secret Jewish History of Prince
Prince died at the age of 57 on April 21, 2016. In honor of what would have been his 60th birthday, we’re re-reading this very Jewish appreciation. In 1993, at the height of his fame, after selling millions of albums, collecting a closetful of Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy awards, and establishing himself as one…
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The Origins of Yiddish: Part Tsvey
In last week’s column dealing with two recent articles about the origins of Eastern European Yiddish, I dwelled more on the first — Cherie Woodworth’s account of the “standard theory” most systematically worked out by the great Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich (1894–1969) and of some of its problematic aspects that have led to the adoption…
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Why Jewish Artists Continue To Be Inspired by The Bible
Art historian Samantha Baskind, author of, among others, “Raphael Soyer and the Search for Modern Jewish Art” and the Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists, now tackles thorny problems of identity and representation in her latest book. “Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America” asks why several modern American Jewish artists were inspired by biblical…
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Holocaust Survivors’ Stories as Cartoons
There’s a painting of Hitler with an almost Picasso-esquely skewed face, and a blue coat. There’s a painting of a boy in a brown suit peering at a swastika painted on a wall. And then there are paintings of houses, people taking walks, forests and trees, lots of trees. In other words, the paintings of…
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The Charmed Life of Charmed Bracelets
Mamie Eisenhower had one, and if you came of age during the 1950s, chances are you had one, too. I’m referring to the charm bracelet, that metallic cluster of miniaturized icons that hung from, and often strained, the wrist of every self-respecting, well-dressed woman in postwar America. As much a fad in its day as…
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Ellen Willis and Me
The Essential Ellen Willis By Ellen Willis Edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz University of Minnesota Press, 536 pages, $24.95 Ellen Willis died in 2006, but her voice still echoes in the culture. Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, an editor and writer for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, founder…
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The True Story of Maine’s Potato King — My Great-Grandfather’s Rise and Fall
My grandmother grew up in a big house on a hill in Fort Kent, Maine, a few hundred yards from the Canadian border. The house had a porch and a turret and, in the bathroom, a Jewish ritual bath. My grandmother’s mother was a religious fanatic. Her father, Jake Etscovitz, was the Potato King. Though…
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A Tale of Twins Who Are Connected — Very Closely
To hear it described, or perhaps even to watch it, the thing can seem uncomfortably like a “Family Guy” fantasy-cutaway parody of a Broadway musical. Consider, especially, its finale: two women, quite literally joined at the hip, belting a tender, plaintive anthem titled “I Will Never Leave You.” There is the pathos, the self-seriousness, the…
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