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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Were They Heroes or Were They Collaborators?
The 1940, Nazi invasion of France turned that country’s musical scene into a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. “Music in Paris During the Occupation,”) a book recently released in France, allows readers to draw conclusions about how music world celebrities behaved in difficult times. Edited by Myriam Chimènes and Yannick Simon,…
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Gary Shteyngart’s Schechter School Tale of Woe
(JTA) — If it is true that there is no such thing as bad publicity, then Gary Shteyngart may be one of the best things to happen to the Conservative movement’s at-times-beleaguered Schechter Day School Network. Shteyngart, the Soviet Jewish immigrant writer known for acclaimed comic novels like “Absurdistan” and “Super Sad True Love Story,”…
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Painting Inspires Dialogue Between Jews and Catholics in Poland
One could not be unmoved when a group of young clerics from the local Catholic seminary sang a popular Israeli song in Hebrew, “Hevenu Shalom Aleikhem” (“We Brought Peace”), during a Catholic service in a small (and in January very sleepy) town in southeastern Poland. The Israeli ambassador to Poland, Zvi Rav Ner, could be…
The Latest
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A Talking Trove of Interviews as AJC Oral History Goes Online
Ever wonder what Detroit Tigers’ slugger Hank Greenberg really had to say about anti-Semitism? Or how Congresswoman Bella Abzug felt about sexual discrimination? From the late 1960s to 1990, some 2,000 people were interviewed for the American Jewish Committee’s William E. Wiener Oral History Library. Recorded on audiocassette, these interviews comprised more than 6,000 hours…
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Books The Author as Therapist for her Characters
Literature is in Zeruya Shalev’s genes. Born in Kvutzat Kinneret in 1959 — a kibbutz by the shores of the Galilee where the songwriter Naomi Shemer was also born — Shalev grew up with a father who was a literary critic and an uncle who was a poet. Her cousin is the acclaimed novelist Meir…
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The Surprising Jewish Flavor of Hayao Miyazaki, King of Japanese Animation
There is much that is unusual about Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, which the master says will be his last. It takes place in our own world, not the mythical past of “Princess Mononoke” or the magical universe of “Spirited Away.” It has a mostly adult, male protagonist, unlike those in many of Miyazaki’s other movies….
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Music Ukraine Rabbis Meet John Kerry in Kiev
Top leaders of Ukraine’s Jewish community joined Secretary of State John Kerry near Kiev’s Independence Square yesterday to commemorate demonstrators who were killed protesting their government last month. In an email to the Forward, the country’s Reform Chief Rabbi Alexander Dukhovny said that he presented a book entitled “Jewish Wisdom” to the secretary of state…
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Is There an E.L. Doctorow in the House?
Andrew’s Brain: A Novel By E.L. Doctorow Random House, $26, 224 pages Is it just me, or does the idea of psychotherapy seem sort of hopelessly 20th century? All those not-quite-hours; all that money; all that talk talk talk talk talk — all to unearth, finally, the tiniest molecules of self-knowledge. Doesn’t it seem a…
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Remembering Alain Resnais and His Complex Relationship With Jews
The French film director Alain Resnais, who died on March 1 at age 91, had a complex relationship with Jews. For many years, his 1955 film “Night and Fog” was shown in classrooms as an approach to understanding the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Yet Resnais’s aims were both more and less than this purpose,…
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Is Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s ‘The Passenger’ Only Holocaust Opera ‘Worth Watching’
Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s parents and sister died in a concentration camp, his Yiddish-language actor father-in-law was killed on Stalin’s orders and the Polish-born composer himself was imprisoned by the KGB and only released after Stalin’s death. His moving Holocaust opera “The Passenger”, which revolves around a former camp guard who recognises a former inmate on an…
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A Glimpse of Jewish Warsaw
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here Menachem Kipnis is known to Jewish history as a cultural figure who worked across several fields. Born in Uzhmir, Ukraine in 1878, Kipnis distinguished himself as a singer, ethnomusicologist and journalist. As a singer he was the first Jewish tenor in the Warsaw Opera (1902-1918) and…
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