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 Origins of Yiddish: Part Fir
In this last of a four-part series about the contemporary controversy over the origins of Yiddish, I’ll begin with the last of the Yiddish linguists profiled by Batya Ungar-Sargon in her Tablet essay, Alexis Manaster Ramer. Born in Poland to Holocaust survivors who came to the United States when he was a child, Manaster Ramer…
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A New Jersey Tale of Two Alfred Doblins — and One Umlaut
I was dozing in front of the TV when I lifted one eyelid to see Rachel Maddow interviewing a man with a trim beard and a startling name: Alfred Doblin. They were discussing Chris Christie and the Bridgegate scandal. Maddow described her guest as the editorial page editor of the Bergen Record, a New Jersey…
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10 things about Jewish New Jersey
It's where Albert Einstein lived, but so much more
The Latest
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Writing About Gaza From Comfort of Debra Winger’s Manhattan Pad
(Haaretz) — It’s so weird to be writing from here. To be writing from New York, where we decided to make a week-long stop before going on to Illinois. How can I write about what’s happening in Israel when I’m not there? How can I sound credible writing about the children in the Gaza Strip…
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Remembering More Than a Century of Bel Kaufman’s Rebellious Charm
Bel Kaufman, who has died on July 25 at the age of 103, once told an audience at Iona College in 2011: “You’re laughing. It’s a very good sound, the sound of survival.” Born Bella Kaufman in 1911, she is best known as author of the 1965 bestseller “Up the Down Staircase” a fictionalized version…
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Ari Goldman Goes From New York Times Journalist To Amateur Cellist
“One of the messages of the book is that you can’t wait for brilliance.” Spoken by Ari Goldman, veteran journalist for the New York Times, author of four books, including 1992’s “The Search for God at Harvard,” and my former professor at Columbia Journalism School, these words seemed odd to me — the life lesson…
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Anya Ulinich Makes Her Graphic Debut
Although her mother hasn’t read her new book, Anya Ulinich already fears the worst. When Ulinich was in the early stages of writing the novel two years ago, her mother begged her to stop. “She hates the idea of this book,” Ulinich said. Ulinich’s novel, “Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel” isn’t a salacious memoir. It’s a…
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Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’ Captures the Spirit of the Time
One of the great productive tensions between Jewish tradition and contemporary spirituality is that between time and the timeless. On the one hand, the passage of time is central in Judaism. Some of this time passes in a linear fashion — we age along with life-cycle events , from birth to death — and some…
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Avery Corman’s Bronx Tale
As Avery Corman and I sit on a bench outside of the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage in the Bronx, I use the term “fairy tale” to describe the setting of his new memoir “My Old Neighborhood Remembered.” Corman, author of the novels “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Oh, God” among other books, smiles when he hears…
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Woody Allen’s ‘Magic in the Moonlight’ Will Be Forgotten Soon
Woody Allen should have quit while he was ahead. I admit it’s hard to say when that was. Would it have been in the late 1980s, after the dark and soulful “Crimes and Misdemeanors”? Was it in the late ’90s, after “Sweet and Lowdown,” starring an incomparable Sean Penn? Or was it earlier in this…
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Film & TV VIDEO: How To Fight Voyeurism in Gaza
When some of us hear “Gaza,” we picture bombs or rockets or rubble. What if, instead, we pictured an adorable little girl in a pink hat? Or a grandfather playing with his grandchild? Or young men handing out ice cream cones? A new short film by Palestinian filmmaker Hadeel Assali is an ingenious exercise in…
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