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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The Inconvenient Truth About Jews From Arab Lands: They Were Expelled
(Haaretz) — Nathan Weinstock hadn’t planned to write a book about the Jews of Arab lands. But when he looked for information about the modern history of Moroccan or Iraqi Jewry, he was surprised to discover that there was no book in French that told the story of the elimination of the Jewish communities in…
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Thoroughly Modernist Jewish Design
Funny how styles come and go. One generation’s eyesore of a couch is another’s prized possession. You need only visit “Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism,” a brand-new exhibition at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum to see how fickle we can be. Filled with stuff formerly consigned to an attic but which now reads as…
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Marcel Gotlib’s Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Moses clutches the Ten Commandments in one hand and tries to hail a taxicab with the other; Yahweh greets Jesus with a “Shalom,”and the latter replies: “Shalom yourself!” These are typical japes from the French comics artist Gotlib (born Marcel Mordekhaï Gottlieb in 1934 to a Romanian-Hungarian Jewish family). “The Worlds of Gotlib,” an exhibit…
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Golden Era for Jewish Life Under the Habsburgs
My great-grandfather, born on April 20, 1892 in Vienna, was drafted into the Imperial and Royal “k.u.k.” Army of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire during World War I. As a physician for the police, he was stationed at the Isonzo in present-day Slovenia, where battles against the Italian army cost more than half a million lives….
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Film & TV WATCH: Project X, Or Eternal Sunshine of the Palestinian Mind
Samer Bisharat, star of Oscar-nominated “Omar,” in Project X / YouTube If you’ve ever seen the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” you’ll immediately be reminded of it after watching the newly released short film “Project X.” The basic plot is the same. Except instead of Jim Carrey trying to erase Kate Winslet from…
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Brooklyn Nags Breathe a Sigh of Relief at ‘King of the Horse Poisoners’ Capture
1914 • 100 years ago Attack of the Horse Poisoner Hyman Edelstein, or, as he is known to the police, the “King of the Horse Poisoners,” was arraigned in a Brooklyn courtroom for having allegedly approached a Brooklyn horse handler, Charles Rosenbaum, demanding $100 or he would “poison his nags.” Rosenbaum handled the situation cleverly,…
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Zayd Dohrn’s ‘Muckrakers’ Is Ripped From His Radical Royalty Bloodline
Zayd Dohrn’s ripped-from-the-headlines “Muckrakers” is a drama about transparency in the digital age that asks: When does disclosure of the public and personal become too much openness? The one-act play was inspired in part by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ exposure of Chelsea Manning’s Iraq and Afghan war revelations. Assange’s alleged sex scandal also informed the…
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‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Turns 50 With an All-Star Celebration
Zalmen Mlotek, artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre (aka Folksbiene) doesn’t seem too surprised — indeed, he sounds matter-of-fact — that the iconic theater is marking its 100th birthday and still going strong. But, he acknowledges its founders, who opened the theater’s doors on the Lower East Side for Yiddish speaking Eastern European immigrants, would…
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My Father, My Self
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Hamlet, Act II, scene 2 It was his suggestion. We could work together on his obituary: father and son. In his final days, it would be another way to connect and smooth things over if there were any lingering bits of resentment. It was early…
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Is ‘Death of Klinghoffer’ Opera Really Anti-Semitic?
(Haaretz) — The contemporary opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” has been fraught with conflict since its premiere, and is poised to be as divisive when it is performed by the Metropolitan Opera here in November, and simultaneously transmitted in high definition to movie theaters around the world. The 1991 opera, by composer John Adams and librettist…
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How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Vladimir Jabotinsky
Jabotinsky: A Life By Hillel Halkin Yale University Press, 256 pages, $25 Hillel Halkin’s new biography, “Jabotinsky: A Life,” features as its frontispiece a 1918 photograph of the activist and author in his British military uniform. It’s an excellent choice of illustration that captures several of the paradoxes of his character. The baby-faced infantry officer…
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