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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Canceling ‘Death of Klinghoffer’ Opera Broadcast Elitist and Naive
While Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League are welcoming the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to cancel its global video and radio simulcast of John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” I’m less enthusiastic. The opera has stoked controversy ever since it premiered with its purportedly sympathetic portrayal of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise…
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The Secret Jewish History of Tupac Shakur
Yes, he does have a very Jewish secret history
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Books Why Soccer Creates the Best Middle East Dialogue
Getty Images Thinkers from Cass Sunstein to Eli Pariser in “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You,” have elucidated the threat to social discourse posed by the Internet. Increasingly able to insulate ourselves from disagreement, we live in bubbles of like-mindedness. From whichever angle, it’s epistemic closure in sociological jargon, “bullshit mountain”…
The Latest
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Books Abraham Klein, The Greatest Soccer Referee
Image courtesy Abraham Klein Israel has reached the World Cup finals just once — Mexico 1970 — where, after losing to Uruguay and tying with Sweden and Italy, it failed to progress beyond the group stage. That year in Mexico, though, there was an outstanding Israeli success — referee Abraham Klein. An unlikely figure to…
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Carla Laemmle, First Voice of ‘Dracula,’ Dies at 104
The American Jewish actress Carla Laemmle, who died on June 12 at the age of 104, was long celebrated for her appearances in some early key horror films. Yet her chief role may have been as witness to the benevolence when confronted with real-life historical horrors of her uncle, Universal Pictures studio founder Carl Laemmle….
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Staging Holocaust Stories Proves Therapeutic for Witness Theater
Sarah Cohen always looked forward to Wednesdays. Every week, from September through April, Cohen, 17, would wait for the end of her classes at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn. Just before 4 p.m., Cohen would head to the wood-paneled room just past the yeshiva’s lobby, which usually serves as its beit midrash, or study…
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Is ‘Kushim’ a Racist Israeli Term for Blacks?
The Forward’s Israel correspondent, Nathan Jeffay, has passed on to me a letter he received. Referring to Jeffay’s May 23 dispatch on Maccabi Tel Aviv’s winning Europe’s 2014 basketball championship cup, it states: “In your article, you mistakenly say that the Hebrew word kushim, when used by Israelis to refer to Maccabi’s black players, is…
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The Inconvenient Truth About Jews From Arab Lands: They Were Expelled
(Haaretz) — Nathan Weinstock hadn’t planned to write a book about the Jews of Arab lands. But when he looked for information about the modern history of Moroccan or Iraqi Jewry, he was surprised to discover that there was no book in French that told the story of the elimination of the Jewish communities in…
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Thoroughly Modernist Jewish Design
Funny how styles come and go. One generation’s eyesore of a couch is another’s prized possession. You need only visit “Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism,” a brand-new exhibition at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum to see how fickle we can be. Filled with stuff formerly consigned to an attic but which now reads as…
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Marcel Gotlib’s Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Moses clutches the Ten Commandments in one hand and tries to hail a taxicab with the other; Yahweh greets Jesus with a “Shalom,”and the latter replies: “Shalom yourself!” These are typical japes from the French comics artist Gotlib (born Marcel Mordekhaï Gottlieb in 1934 to a Romanian-Hungarian Jewish family). “The Worlds of Gotlib,” an exhibit…
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Golden Era for Jewish Life Under the Habsburgs
My great-grandfather, born on April 20, 1892 in Vienna, was drafted into the Imperial and Royal “k.u.k.” Army of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire during World War I. As a physician for the police, he was stationed at the Isonzo in present-day Slovenia, where battles against the Italian army cost more than half a million lives….
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