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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Why Did John Kerry Mock ‘Pinpoint Operation’ in Gaza?
‘That is a hell of a pinpoint operation, a hell of a pinpoint operation,” Secretary of State John Kerry said to Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace on Sunday, July 20, in reference to the Israeli military operation in Gaza. The channel’s viewers did not get to hear this remark, because Kerry made it after he…
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Why Are There So Few Men in Jewish Nursery School Classrooms?
It’s circle time in classroom four. Sixteen 5-year-olds sit on the carpet and patiently wait for the weather report. After observing Amsterdam Avenue through the large windows of the JCC in Manhattan’s nursery school, a blond girl in a pink dress announces, “It’s sunny and cloudy.” Her peers seem content with the analysis, and the…
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A People’s Theatrical History of Howard Zinn
Is the bard mightier than the sword? As war rages around the globe, playwright Bianca Bagatourian ponders this question as she brings “The Times of Our Lies, A Play about the Life and Times of Howard Zinn” to debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The Brooklyn-born and raised son of Jewish immigrants, Zinn, who died…
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Life Is a Chai-Way for Jewish Biker Clubs
When Gil Paul took up the motorbike around 10 years ago, he did a half-hearted Internet search for other Jewish motorcyclists. “I just didn’t imagine that there were Jews that rode,” he said. “As luck would have it, I found the Hillel’s Angels.” Call it luck — mazel, perhaps — but it turns out that…
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Pulitzer Prize-Winning Marilynne Robinson Discusses Her First Trip to Israel
Marilynne Robinson is the Pulitzer and Orange Prize-winning author of the novels “Housekeeping,” “Gilead,” “Home” and the forthcoming “Lila.” Not long before hostilities broke out in the region, she attended the fourth annual International Writer’s Festival at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim cultural center in Jerusalem. Robinson is a committed Christian who grew up Presbyterian and now…
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‘Jews Who Rock’ Only Scratches Surface of Fame and Faith
In the gallery of Jewish Museum Milwaukee, sunlight streams in through windows that display colorful floor-to-ceiling banners from a concert shot taken at Milwaukee Summerfest in 1995. Nearby is a display of a redwood and abalone inlay bass guitar loaned to the museum by members of Howie Epstein’s family. Howie, bassist for Tom Petty and…
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Living Under the Iron Dome
The Middle East conflict: No doubt you have heard this phrase at least a thousand and one times, and so have I. The conflict, as you probably heard over a thousand times too, is the result of settlements. And now that rockets are flying over Israel, I’ve decided to go to the settlements to check…
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Are Michelangelo’s Drawings Anti-Semitic?
Ancestral Torpor: Jews and Christians in the Sistine Chapel By Giovanni Careri Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 325 pages, $36 The American Jewish writer Irving Stone (born Tannenbaum) aptly titled his 1961 novel about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” For centuries, ecstatic tourists have admired the…
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10 things about Jewish New Jersey
It's where Albert Einstein lived, but so much more
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The Origins of Yiddish: Part Fir
In this last of a four-part series about the contemporary controversy over the origins of Yiddish, I’ll begin with the last of the Yiddish linguists profiled by Batya Ungar-Sargon in her Tablet essay, Alexis Manaster Ramer. Born in Poland to Holocaust survivors who came to the United States when he was a child, Manaster Ramer…
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A New Jersey Tale of Two Alfred Doblins — and One Umlaut
I was dozing in front of the TV when I lifted one eyelid to see Rachel Maddow interviewing a man with a trim beard and a startling name: Alfred Doblin. They were discussing Chris Christie and the Bridgegate scandal. Maddow described her guest as the editorial page editor of the Bergen Record, a New Jersey…
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