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
Is the U.S. Getting Better at Soccer?
Getty Images As Team USA carries the hopes of the English-speaking world in Brazil, inquiring minds are wondering why England is so perennially terrible at the sport it invented (and let’s not get started on cricket). It is a question that was surprisingly well answered in 2009, along with the corollary question about how America…
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Kafkaesque ‘Wild Tales’ Is Jewish Film from Argentina Inspired by Steven Spielberg
‘Why did you ruin a perfectly good Jewish wedding?” The question is addressed to Damián Szifrón, the 38-year-old director of “Relatos Salvajes” (“Wild Tales”), the Argentinian film that competed at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. He seems caught off guard. Indeed, it’s unlikely that many of the audience members recognized the amped-up version of “Havenu…
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Books From One Soccer Writer to Another
There are two Jonathan Wilsons writing about soccer in a knowledgeable way. One is Jonathan Wilson from the Guardian, arguably the foremost journalistic expert on tactics in the modern game, the other is Jonathan Wilson, the Tufts University Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, who covered the 1994 World Cup for The New Yorker and…
The Latest
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Books Jewish Roots of the ‘Beautiful Game’
British Jews have never accounted for more than 1% of the population. And their contribution to soccer has always been obscured. But, in his well-researched and compellingly-written history, “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The History of Football’s Forgotten Tribe,” Anthony Clavane explains the outsize contribution of British Jews to British soccer and their pivotal…
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Canceling ‘Death of Klinghoffer’ Opera Broadcast Elitist and Naive
While Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League are welcoming the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to cancel its global video and radio simulcast of John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” I’m less enthusiastic. The opera has stoked controversy ever since it premiered with its purportedly sympathetic portrayal of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise…
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The Secret Jewish History of Tupac Shakur
Yes, he does have a very Jewish secret history
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Books Why Soccer Creates the Best Middle East Dialogue
Getty Images Thinkers from Cass Sunstein to Eli Pariser in “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You,” have elucidated the threat to social discourse posed by the Internet. Increasingly able to insulate ourselves from disagreement, we live in bubbles of like-mindedness. From whichever angle, it’s epistemic closure in sociological jargon, “bullshit mountain”…
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Books Abraham Klein, The Greatest Soccer Referee
Image courtesy Abraham Klein Israel has reached the World Cup finals just once — Mexico 1970 — where, after losing to Uruguay and tying with Sweden and Italy, it failed to progress beyond the group stage. That year in Mexico, though, there was an outstanding Israeli success — referee Abraham Klein. An unlikely figure to…
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Carla Laemmle, First Voice of ‘Dracula,’ Dies at 104
The American Jewish actress Carla Laemmle, who died on June 12 at the age of 104, was long celebrated for her appearances in some early key horror films. Yet her chief role may have been as witness to the benevolence when confronted with real-life historical horrors of her uncle, Universal Pictures studio founder Carl Laemmle….
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Staging Holocaust Stories Proves Therapeutic for Witness Theater
Sarah Cohen always looked forward to Wednesdays. Every week, from September through April, Cohen, 17, would wait for the end of her classes at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn. Just before 4 p.m., Cohen would head to the wood-paneled room just past the yeshiva’s lobby, which usually serves as its beit midrash, or study…
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Is ‘Kushim’ a Racist Israeli Term for Blacks?
The Forward’s Israel correspondent, Nathan Jeffay, has passed on to me a letter he received. Referring to Jeffay’s May 23 dispatch on Maccabi Tel Aviv’s winning Europe’s 2014 basketball championship cup, it states: “In your article, you mistakenly say that the Hebrew word kushim, when used by Israelis to refer to Maccabi’s black players, is…
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