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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Getting Back to the Garden (of Eden)
Looking at an image of a serpent encircling an apple branch, most of us will think of the snake from the Garden of Eden. In popular lore, Adam and Eve’s consumption of the taboo meal from the illicit Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as it is called in the Bible, resulted in their…
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My Hunt for the Cossacks in Ukraine
For no particular reason, I find myself attending a service in a Budapest church that is rumored to be associated with the far-right Jobbik party. There’s no cross in this church, only flags, and quite many of them, depicting Hungary in various historical stages. Some of the flags contain the so-called Árpád stripes, which opponents…
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Lee Grant Said Yes to Everything — Except McCarthyism
I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir By Lee Grant Blue Rider Press, 480 pages, $28.95 Oscar-winning American Jewish actress Lee Grant is one of the rare performers (along with Zero Mostel) to have eventually triumphed over the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. She did so through a combination of fierce determination, zesty…
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Modern Music With Minimalist Roots
Defining Bang on a Can is hard. Founded in 1987 by composers David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe, it is a musical collective made up of composers and musicians dedicated to performing, producing, and commissioning new music that is innovative in some way. Among their most prominent projects is the annual Bang on a…
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Lower East Side Anarchist Declares Hunger Strike in Prison
1914 • 100 years ago An Anarchist in Manhattan Rebecca Edelson, a well-known anarchist on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has declared a hunger strike in prison, where she is serving a three-month stint after being arrested for refusing to stop giving a speech on a street corner. According to eyewitnesses, hooligans were throwing stones at…
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Shady Lower East Side Salesman Takes Advantage of Young Women
1914 • 100 years ago Man Using Immigrant Women For many years, one of the well-known figures on Manhattan’s Lower East Side was a ship ticket salesman named Max Wax. If one needed to purchase a ticket from Europe to America, Wax was the go-to man. But Wax appears to be in big trouble after…
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What’s a Nice Jewish Boy Like Jake Kasdan Doing Making a ‘Sex Tape?’
Jake Kasdan has been on a roll lately. He’s executive producing and directing episodes of “New Girl,” the Zooey Deschanel comedy about to begin its fourth season on Fox. His last film, “Bad Teacher,” starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, cost about $20 million to make and grossed over $216 million at the box office….
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The Gift Nadine Gordimer Gave to Me
There is one quality that is perhaps more important to a writer than any other. Nadine Gordimer, who died this week in South Africa at the age of ninety, not only possessed it in abundance but was able to grant a measure of it to others, as she did to me when I was struggling…
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Books Now You Can Call Ishmael, To Talk About Books
“Call me Ishmael,” declares one of the most famous opening sentences in Western literature. But what if the narrator of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” was actually asking you to call him? That was the whimsical thought Logan Smalley offered in a spirited bar conversation about notable first sentences. He jotted the notion down on a…
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Star of the Show That Inspired ‘Homeland’ Discusses How TV Affected Reality in Israel
“Prisoners of War,” the Israeli TV drama that inspired “Homeland,” will be released on DVD in the United States on July 8 — and the timing couldn’t be better. “POW” concerns three Israeli soldiers who finally get to return to their families after 17 years in captivity, only to discover that life in the public…
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The Women Rabbis Of New Mexico
When I tell East Coast Jews that I’m from New Mexico, the first question out of their mouths is invariably, “Are there Jews in New Mexico?” Once I’ve quashed the temptation to shoot back, “What do YOU think?” I go on to explain. Yes, there are Jews in New Mexico. Yes, there is a synagogue…
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