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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Music
Can Polyglot Odessa Avoid Stain of Separatist Massacre?
(Reuters) — Odessa: the very name conjures up an archetypal melting pot, a balmy oasis of tolerance and diversity, as well as a tsarist port of imperial grandeur, immortalised in film. But can a city forever associated with a massacre of civilians more than a century ago now avoid becoming known as the place where…
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Still Waiting for Godot
Killing the Second Dog By Marek Hlasko, translated from the Polish by Tomasz Mirkowicz New Vessel Press, 143 pages, $15.99 In the aftermath of World War II, while Europe was responding to the dissipation of the old empires and feudal orders by reconfiguring itself around capitalist and communist ideologies, its novelists took it upon themselves…
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Bakashot Makes Unlikely Comeback as Sephardic Jews Explore Traditions
(JTA) — The group of young Jewish professionals had gathered to participate in the revival of a Sephardic tradition hearkening back to the days of their grandparents and great-grandparents. Arriving at an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, they greeted each other in French and settled in around a dining table laid out with snacks…
The Latest
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A Daughter’s Letter to Her Father for Mother’s Day
When I was a girl, on Friday nights, I would compete with my sisters for the privilege of fetching my father’s slippers when he returned home from prayers. My siblings and I would beg for the seat to my father’s left or right at the Sabbath meal. I was often chosen for this honor. My…
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Books ‘Clueless’ Advice: Alicia Silverstone Won’t Circumcise Son
Someone should have told Alicia Silverstone that once your claim to fame is a movie called “Clueless,” it’s probably a good idea to avoid spouting real-life clueless rhetoric. In her her new book, “The Kind Mama: A Simple Guide to Supercharged Fertility, a Radiant Pregnancy, a Sweeter Birth, and a Healthier, More Beautiful Beginning,” the…
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Louis Armstrong’s Secret Lessons From Judaism
Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism By Thomas Brothers W. W. Norton & Company, 608 pages, $39.95 A massive, and massively detailed new biography, reminds music mavens that jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong assimilated lessons from Judaism and expressed them through music and writing during his long career. “Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism” by Thomas Brothers is…
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If You Don’t Know the Way to Hell, You Can Find It on a Map
George Jochnowitz writes about “gehenna,” an English synonym for “hell” that comes, via Greek and Latin, from the Hebrew word gehinnom. This in turn derives from gey ben hinnom, “the valley of the son of Hinnom” (or simply “the Valley of Hinnom,” as it is known in English), which is the biblical name of a…
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What If World War I Had Never Happened?
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I By Richard Ned Lebow Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $27 In the introduction to his new book, “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I,” Richard Ned Lebow discloses a poignant personal reason for his interest in counterfactual history. The professor of international political…
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American Protection for Mexican Oil Fields
1913 •100 years ago Military Protection for Mexican Oil Fields The latest news about Mexico makes it clear why such a murderous patriotism is being heated up and instigated in America: It’s cooking on an oil fire. Human blood must flow so that the oil supply will grow – in the tanks of the company…
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Music Roger Waters Urges Rolling Stones To Boycott Israel
Two founding members of the Pink Floyd rock band called on their colleagues from The Rolling Stones to cancel a concert in Israel. Roger Waters and Nick Mason made the call in an op-ed that was published Thursday on Salon.com. “Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of…
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The Cross-Dressing Racecar Driver Who Aided the Nazis (It’s Mostly True!)
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 By Francine Prose Harper, 448 pages, $26.99 The plot of Francine Prose’s new novel, “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,” sounds, in an admittedly reductive summary, slightly preposterous: A cross-dressing French lesbian racecar driver collaborates with the Nazis, revealing where the Maginot Line ends, thus enabling the…
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Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
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Music ‘No matter what, I will always be a Jew.’ Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history
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Culture She was my Hebrew school bully — and I finally learned what happened to her
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Opinion What Democrats fighting Trump should learn from Germany’s failure to stop Hitler
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Fast Forward 31st anniversary of AMIA bombing marked by ceremonies in Argentina, Israel and, for the first time, Congress
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