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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Philip Roth, Once Outcast, Joins Jewish Fold With Jewish Theological Seminary Honor
(JTA) — What is being done to silence this man?” an American rabbi asked in a 1963 letter to the Anti-Defamation League. He was talking about the novelist Philip Roth, whose early novels and short stories cast his fellow American Jews in what some considered a none-too-flattering light. Fast-forward half a century. On Thursday, the…
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Crown Heights Jews Defending Themselves Against Hooligans
1914 • 100 years ago From Pogroms to Ellis Island As many readers already know, 800 Jewish families were expelled from Kiev about five weeks ago. The first of these unhappy immigrants landed recently on Ellis Island. An immigration official presented one of them, a cantor by the name of Eliyahu Teller, to reporters as…
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Germany’s Inferiority Complex and the Holocaust
● Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust By Götz Aly Metropolitan Books, 304 pages, $30 Early in his penetrating and provocative study of the roots of German anti-Semitism, “Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust,” Götz Aly quotes…
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Alejandro Jodorowsky Goes on a Voyage in Search of Himself
If you could go back and visit your childhood self, what would you say? Would you offer words of advice? Warning? Wonder how the child you were both is and isn’t the person you became? This theme is at the heart of “The Dance of Reality,” a new movie by Chilean-Jewish director Alejandro Jodorowsky. In…
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8 New Israeli Writers You Need To Read Right Now
Dalia Betolin-Sherman is the first Ethiopian woman to publish a volume of short stories in Hebrew. In conversation, she speaks modestly about the success of “How the World Became White,” which won the 2014 Ramat Gan prize for debut literature. I met her at the Tel Aviv café Tola’at Sefarim Maazeh, where she told me…
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When Auschwitz Was a Jewish Town
Of all the things and places to give an endearing Jewish name, Auschwitz would seem the most unlikely. Oshpitzin — which comes from the Aramaic word for guest, ushpizin, and is the name of a traditional Sukkot prayer that welcomes guests — was how Jews once referred to Oswiecim, the Polish town that would become…
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Family Escaping Russian Pogrom Incarcerated on Ellis Island
1914 • 100 years ago The Island of Blood and Tears Avrom Pogrebensky, a night watchman, scrimped and saved to bring his wife, Sarah Pogrebensky, and their two sons over to America from Samarkand, Russia. Finally united, the family was set to begin a new life in New York. But the school that the Pogrebenskys’…
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The Last Living Yiddish Speaker in Lviv
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. During an emotional scene in the new documentary film “Boris Dorfman: A Mentsh,” the 90-year-old Dorfman stands in a forest near Rudno, Ukraine, at the spot where the Germans murdered the last surviving Jews from the Lviv ghetto in June of 1943. Near a memorial-marker that he…
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Why You Shouldn’t Call Mel Bochner a Lox Jock
From King Solomon to Ludwig Wittgenstein — with the notable exception of Moses — Jews have always been people of words. It seems appropriate, therefore, that the artist Mel Bochner’s new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, a retrospective of decades’ worth of his work and his first major museum show in New York City, is…
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There’s Something Rotten in Akko (and It’s Not the Falafel)
Akko’s Old City, many people told me, is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, but I never found the time to go there. At least not until today, when I decided that it’s time I finally heed their advice. I don’t know anybody in Akko — Old City or New — which…
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Spitting and Other Methods of Warding Off Canaries, Jinxes and Evil Eyes
Forward reader Herb Hoffman writes: “I was raised in Brooklyn with the knowledge that spitting three times (or at least making a ritualized spitting movement or sound, which I’ve always rendered as ‘ptu, ptu, ptu’) is an effective way of warding off a kinehore — or ‘canary’ in my native Yinglish. My mother especially used…
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