Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Organizers Prepare Palestinian Museum For 2015 Opening
2014 will see intensified preparations for the projected April 2015 opening of the Palestinian Museum, which will be the biggest museum devoted to Palestinian culture and identity. Since last April’s groundbreaking ceremony for the 3,000-square-meter project — the size of half a regulation soccer field — director and head curator Jack Persekian has been busy…
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Two World Wars Face Major Milestones in 2014
Numerologists and war buffs have much to anticipate this year thanks to an unusual confluence of commemorative events. 2014 marks both the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I and the 75th anniversary of the start of World War II. Given the enormous attention that numerically significant anniversaries have acquired in Western culture,…
The Latest
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The Russian (Authors) Are Coming
One thing we know for sure is that 2014 will be a big year for young post-Soviet Jews who write in English. Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming memoir, which he did not title “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Jewness,” has already called attention to itself with a four-minute video that almost but not quite redeems the genre…
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Keep Your Eye on Nikki Yanofsky in 2014
Nikki Yanofsky seems preternaturally destined for global stardom. At the age of 12, she was spotted singing with her father’s garage band at a charity event for a Jewish geriatric center and was immediately invited to perform at the opening concert of the 2006 Montreal International Jazz Festival before a crowd of 125,000. Since then,…
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How Ileana Sonnabend Became MoMA’s Ambassador of the New
It sounds like the beginning of a riddle, or the setup for a logic problem. How to reconcile these two facts: (1) Ileana Sonnabend was not an artist; (2) the Museum of Modern Art is devoting a small but significant show to Ileana Sonnabend and anointing her “ambassador for the new.” Actually, the distance between…
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How an Israeli Teenage Jazz Star Emerged
Viewed from the upper-level seats in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room, Gadi Lehavi cut a slight figure. Seated at the piano, he seemed to disappear beneath a mop of unruly hair. But when he started to play, a giant-in-the-making emerged — and a moment was defined for the millennial generation of Israeli jazz musicians….
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Why a Jewish Manager Might Win World Series For First Time Since 1948
In November of last year, when Brad Ausmus was hired to be the new manager of the Detroit Tigers, a major milestone in Jewish baseball history was achieved. In addition to becoming the first Jewish skipper in the 119-year saga of one of baseball’s oldest and most respected franchises, Ausmus is also only the sixth…
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When Jews and Blacks Got Along Better Than Ever — in Hip-Hop World
History tends to treat the largely cordial relationship between African-Americans and Jews as a thing that ended around 1991, in Crown Heights. But in 2013, hip-hop was one place where Jews and African Americans got along just fine. Some of the most talked about releases in hip-hop this year were recorded by Jewish artists: Drake,…
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How 2013 Became the Year of Bernie Madoff
Here is a corollary to Marx’s great insight that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, itself a clarification of Hegel’s sense that people and events recur: Scandal, too, will repeat itself; first as laboriously documented news, then as thinly veiled fiction. Consider the case of Bernard “Bernie” Madoff: Even the name seems…
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Opera Star Marta Eggerth Dies at 101
The Budapest-born soprano Marta Eggerth, who died on December 26 at the age of 101, incarnated the fact that the frothy Middle European art-form of operetta had a vastly significant Jewish element. Both Eggerth and her husband the star tenor Jan Kiepura (1902-1966), Poland’s prefiguration of Mario Lanza, had Jewish mothers. This made life difficult…
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Books 5 Jewish Books To Read in 2014
At this time of year, I’m confronted with the many books published in 2013 that I haven’t yet managed to read. It seems that every day another “best-of” list materializes to remind me of the recurrent truth: There’s just never enough time to get to all of the books that I’d like to read, not…
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Fast Forward Rep. Max Miller says driver called him a ‘dirty Jew’ and threatened to kill his family. A local doctor turned himself in.
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News An Alabama millionaire offered Jews $50,000 to move to his town. 16 years later, what’s left?
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News As Israel attacks, what is life like for Jews in Iran?
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Culture Why is Israel’s attack on Iran called ‘Rising Lion’ — and what does the Bible have to do with it?
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