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 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…
The Latest
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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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Books Joan Rivers Storms Out of CNN Interview
Apparently all that plastic surgery didn’t give Joan Rivers a thick skin. On July 5, Joan Rivers made headlines after she stormed out of a CNN interview claiming the anchor, Fredricka Whitfield, was asking increasingly “negative questions.” Rivers, known for her (sometimes) off-color jokes has picked on everyone from Paula Deen to the Jennifer Lawrence….
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How Liturgy Can Co-Exist With Backstreet Boys and The Wu-Tang Clan
I doubt many of the attendees at Kehilat Hadar’s Upper West Side Yom Kippur services, at which the “Lamedvavnik Niggun” made its debut liturgical appearance last fall, knew the story behind the tune. I do, because I cooked it up with Aryeh Bernstein, who leads high holiday services at Hadar. We borrowed the melody from…
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Books How Lee Grant Recovered From the Blacklist
“Some working actors lost the best years of their lives and don’t know why.” Those words were written by actress/director Lee Grant in her new memoir, “I Said Yes To Everything.” And she should know. She was one of them. Grant was the “surprise discovery” of the 1950 Broadway season for her role in “Detective…
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‘Seinfeld’ Revolutionized Pop Culture 25 Years Ago — and That’s a Bad Thing
Every era gets the sitcom it deserves. In the early 90s that sitcom was “Seinfeld,” a show about a motley collection of Jews on the upper west side of Manhattan, kvetching, kvelling and ordering soup. And now, 25 years after its premiere, Seinfeld can be seen as a turning point not only in American comedy,…
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‘The Search’ Relives Auschwitz — in Chechnya
In 1948, Hollywood director Fred Zinnemann travelled to postwar Germany to film “The Search,” a melodrama about a Czech mother and son who survive Auschwitz and look for each other amid the ruins of the Third Reich. The film is best remembered today for Montgomery Clift’s nuanced portrayal of a GI who looks after the…
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Books Jennifer Weiner Questions Genre and Gender in the Literary World
Most people who recognize Jennifer Weiner know her as an author of fiction aimed at women, a writer whose pastel-covered covers perennially crowd the best-seller list and command an audience most novelists would salivate over. She has written 11 books and had one made into a rom-com starring Cameron Diaz (the 2005 film “In Her…
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An Atheist’s Case for Talmud
When I recently wrote my memoir of leaving ultra-Orthodoxy, I spent days ravaged by sobbing fits, debilitating chest pain, and migraines as I reencountered the trauma my 17-year-old self had experienced after I was pushed out of my yeshivish family for my rebellion. Shaken, I was fearful that when I went even further back to…
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