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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Books
A Soviet Journey to Adulthood
Ellen Litman dreamed of being a writer when she went to school in Moscow in the 1980s. There was only one problem: She was Jewish, and thus she was advised to focus on something more practical, since in the Soviet Union, Jews couldn’t be successful at writing. Litman studied math and computer programming, and immigrated…
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Ab Cahan’s Ghost Returns in Cartoon Form
● A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York By Liana Finck Ecco, 128 pages, $17.99 The advice column known as “A Bintel Brief,” meaning “a bundle of letters,” was the brainchild of Abraham Cahan, the founder of the Forverts, the original Yiddish-language incarnation of this very publication. In 1906, when the paper…
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Doomed Jewish Freedom Fighter’s Journey From Tel Aviv to Auschwitz
(Haaretz) — For decades, no one took an interest in the seven letters, handwritten in Polish and kept in the home of Priva and Jacob Bendet. They had been sent in the 1930s to Priva, at her home in Tel Aviv, by her sister Lusia, from Warsaw and from Paris. “One letter led to the…
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How Alfred Dreyfus Laid the Foundations for Blogging and Social Networking
Revising Dreyfus Edited by Maya Balakirsky Katz Brill, 438 pages, $209 The public trial for treason of French Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus has proven fodder for everything from anti-Semitic walking cane handles to a riot-inducing 1931 play and another play in 1974, which the New York Times panned as a flop. Roman Polanski is reportedly…
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Why We’re Living in the Golden Age of Jewish Baseball
Jewish museums in the United States often walk a tightrope when planning special exhibitions: Should they focus exclusively on the Jewish experience or study other ethnic communities as well? The former approach risks parochialism, while the latter would make the museum’s focus overly broad. In its new exhibit on Jews and baseball, “Chasing Dreams: Baseball…
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Lars Von Trier’s ‘Nymph()maniac’ Is Uncomfortable But Thought-Provoking
For those still brooding over the Woody Allen scandal, consider those of us who are fans of Lars von Trier. Von Trier is not a 78-year-old comic with a single crime, alleged to have taken place twenty years ago, never proven, and dismissed by law enforcement. He is a complicated, depressed, brilliant, misunderstood, controversial filmmaker…
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Why Jews Suffer From a Quilt Complex
The much-vaunted distinctiveness of the Jews resides in what they eat, how they attend to their prayers, and the means by which they earn their keep. Their distinctiveness, as it turns out, is a matter of textiles, too. No, I don’t have in mind Torah mantles or challah covers, but something far more quotidian: bedding….
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Books Remembering Herman Taube, Witness to a Vanished World
Herman Taube, a novelist, poet and longtime Washington correspondent for the Forverts, died March 25 in Rockville, Maryland. He was 96. Born on February 2, 1918, in Lodz, Poland, Taube was orphaned at a young age and was raised by his grandparents, Mirle and Gershon Mandel. In an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial…
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Why Woody Allen’s ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ Is a Bright Shining Lie
The plot of “Bullets over Broadway,” the new musical by Woody Allen (with essential help from director Susan Stroman and music “adaptor” and lyrics tweaker Glen Kelly), is built around an elaborate setup. David Shayne, a Greenwich Village artiste in the vein of Eugene O’Neill, discovers to his astonishment that one of his experimental, symbol-laden…
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How Wes Anderson Became a Jewish Emigré Director in ‘Budapest Hotel’
An elaborately constructed caper set in a fairy-tale Europe on the eve of World War II, Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is many things: a wild tumble through another of the director’s painstakingly designed imaginary worlds; a gleefully overstuffed ensemble piece with an all-star cast; and a near-perfect combination of sophistication and silliness. It…
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The Secret Jewish History of the Coffee Cup (Starbucks and Otherwise)
In the Talmud (Eruvin 65b), Rabbi Ilai cleverly opines: “A person is recognized by three things: their cup, their pocket, and their anger.” In other words, how they handle their liquor (self control), their money (generosity), and their temper (patience). It’s a lot more poetic in the Hebrew, where the three characteristics are, “koso, kiso,…
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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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Fast Forward Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
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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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