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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Harold Ramis Was All of Us
Ask any fan of the 1981 comedy “Stripes” about their favorite scenes from the film, and a sizeable percentage will recall the one where Bill Murray and Harold Ramis, seeking to escape their respective dead-end existences, visit a local Army recruiting office. Murray gets most of the laughs in the scene, but Ramis gets off…
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Who Cares if Movies Are Historically Accurate?
It is depressing to read so many articles decrying the historical inaccuracies in recent movies, whether dealing with outer space, the southern slave trade, Somali pirates, or Walt Disney, articles in which the least deviation from the historical record or “reality” (a word Nabokov insisted routinely belongs within quotation marks), is held up against the…
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Teenage Immigrant Busted for Pimping Women in Lower East Side Tenement
1913 •100 years ago Jewish Immigrant Arrested for Pimping After only eight months in the country, 17-year-old immigrant Arthur Goldman was sentenced to a stint in jail after being arrested as a pimp. His unfortunate story has more to do with his aunt, Fanny Bailik, who lived with Goldman in a tenement on Norfolk Street…
The Latest
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Kenneth Bonert’s ‘Lion Seeker’ Is Best New Novel You Haven’t Read
I first heard of Kenneth Bonert’s “The Lion Seeker” maybe a year ago when I was having lunch with Harcourt Houghton Mifflin executive director of publicity Lori Glazer at some hoity-toity place in Union Square whose name I forget. Yes, this is a boring way to start a story, but bear with me because there’s…
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11 Best Performances by Non-Jewish Actors Playing Jews in the Movies
Observers of the convergence of Jewish and mainstream American culture will be keeping a close watch on this year’s Academy Awards in which — for the first time in movie history as far as the Forward can tell — the two leading contenders for the Best Actor award are non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters. In…
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The Kabbalah of Skiing
It turns out that I’ve underestimated the spiritual importance of chairlifts. Give people a Rorschach test with an Austria-shaped ink stain (a spoon tilted to the right with an oversized bowl and a short handle), and skiing is likely to be among the terms associated with my alpine native country. Every winter holiday while I…
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The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote
Was Don Quixote’s impossible dream a Yiddisher one? The French author Dominique Aubier, whose study “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” has just been reprinted, apparently thinks so. Aubier’s book, which originally appeared in 1966, is based on the thesis now generally accepted by literary historians that the author of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes, likely…
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Menachem Beilis ‘Blood Libel’ Case Gets a New Hearing
● A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel By Edmund Levin Schocken, 362 pages, $28.95 A little more than 100 years ago, an innocent man was about to go on trial. His alleged crime: the murder of a 13-year-old boy two years earlier, found dead of multiple…
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Can the West Bank Also Be Judea and Samaria?
Israeli peace negotiator Tzipi Livni and her Palestinian counterpart, Saeb Erekat, had an emotional exchange the other day at a meeting of the 47th annual Munich Security Conference. It started when Livni used the traditional Jewish terms “Judea” and “Samaria” to refer to the area known to Palestinians and most of the world as “the…
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Everything He Wanted To Know About Sex Among the Orthodox
Racheli Ibenboim is a Haredi lady of the Gur dynasty, one of the most fundamentalist branches in the hasidic world. The Gur people, for one reason or another, are ever busy with ever more rules forbidding more and more “sexual temptations” of whatever kind. For example, not long ago a new prohibition was announced: A…
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‘Kosher’ Chicken Sold on ‘Holy’ Lower East Side Was Really Treyf
1913 •100 years ago Treyf Chicken Sold as Kosher “About strikes you’re willing to write, but about my slaughtered chicken with the treyf neck, you won’t write? What kind of paper are you? Where is your sense of justice?” It was with these words that Brooklyn resident Rokhl Beinisohn berated the editors of the Forverts….
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