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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You Can Pay Jews To Live in Dothan, Alabama. But Will They Stay?
Saturday night is bowling night for the Jews of Dothan, Alabama. On a hot night in July, four families braved the torrential rain and gathered for the monthly meeting of the “Mitzvah League,” the town’s Jewish bowling team. Dothan Lanes is a non-descript, squat, faded building on the side of Montgomery Highway. Even the sign…
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Was Pope John Paul II Good for the Jews?
John Paul II’s Letter to a Jewish Friend: The Heart-Rending Story of Two Polish Boys Divided by World War II, Reunited by Love by Gian Franco Svidercoschi The Crossroad Publishing Company, 108 pages, $13.13 In April, when Pope John Paul II became Saint John Paul the Great, admirers recalled the late pontiff’s affinity for the…
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Books New York Exhibit on Children’s Books Highlights Many Jewish Contributions
‘It’s a pattern really. So many of the progressive writers and illustrators of children’s books were Jews,” says Leonard Marcus, who does not usually concern himself with the old parlor game of counting famous Jews. Marcus is curator of the New York Public Library’s exhibit on children’s literature, “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books…
The Latest
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‘Mad Man’ on the Movie Set
Pretty much every profile of Matthew Weiner has his professional history down pat. A writer for TV’s “Becker,” he penned a spec script about a 1960s ad agency that caught the eye of David Chase. Chase hired him first as a writer and then as a producer of “The Sopranos.” Several years later, Weiner shopped…
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FMF Patients Battle for Awareness and Affordable Drugs
It was just a fever and a sore throat that first caught my father by surprise one morning in the early 2000s. But then the fever persisted on and off for weeks. After a while, he could barely climb a staircase due to his exhaustion. It took seeing five doctors — two internists, an allergy…
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A Network for Courageous Parents Offers New Views, Advice on Grief
Sitting next to her husband in their Palm City, Florida, living room, Oralea Marquardt describes the last few moments of her 8-year-old son William’s life. Displayed prominently behind the Marquardts are photographs of William, who died in February from GM1 — a genetic disorder that causes a progressive loss of cognitive and motor functions. “He…
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The Genes That Affect Indian-Jewish Vision
BEERSHEVBA, ISRAEL — Jews of Indian origin are, for the first time, taking control of a genetic mutation linked to sight problems that can’t be rectified with spectacles. Indian Jews living in Israel have their roots in either Mumbai or Cochin, and 1 in 10 Jews from Mumbai families carries a recessive gene that, when…
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Two Grieving Mothers, One Friendship
Scanning her inbox last fall, Becky Benson happened upon an unusual request from a pregnant friend, Emily Rapp: Would she mind if Rapp gave the baby a middle name to honor Benson’s younger daughter, Elliott? If the proposition sounded weird to her, the email went on, she should just feel free to forget it. “I…
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Searching for My Birth Mother’s Jewish Heritage
Growing up in a Modern Orthodox family in Miami Beach in the 1960s was like being raised in a Technicolor Anatevka. Shabbats and Jewish holidays dictated the rhythm of life for the community. I spent endless hours in synagogues davening or pretending to, and half of each school day focused on Jewish studies. Firsthand accounts…
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Lauren Bacall’s 7 Greatest Moments
Born Betty Joan Perske, the daughter of Jewish parents in the Bronx, Lauren Bacall would soon became the epitome of New York cool. She was the slim, caustic partner of Humphrey Bogart, whom she married at the age of twenty and starred with in such films as “To Have and Have Not,” “Dark Passage,” “Key…
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The Unbearable Sadness of Being Robin Williams
From the beginning of his career straight through to the end, Robin Williams was a superstar, an unavoidable cultural presence, yet when I attempt to conjure memories of his performances, I don’t compulsively recite famous punchlines or stream emblematic bits in my head, not at first. It takes a second before that ribbity “nanu nanu”…
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