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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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Books In Joshua Safran’s Memoir, Jack Kerouac Meets Edgar Allan Poe
Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid By Joshua Safran Hyperion, 288 pages, $24.99 Among the American contributions to world literature, perhaps least appreciated is the genre of automotive horror. To be sure, we are acknowledged to have invented the road trip, which was prophesied by Huck Finn and Lewis and…
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Doris Lessing and the Jews
Doris Lessing, who died on November 17 at age 94, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature for her prolific writings ranging from autobiography to what she called “space fiction.” Sometimes overlooked was the lasting inspiration which Lessing, born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in Persia, drew from Jews and Jewish heritage. In 1925, her…
The Latest
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Ari Shavit Still Believes in a ‘Promised Land’
Ari Shavit wants to do nothing less than prompt a fresh discourse on Israel, something free and loving, critical and authentic, a conversation that accepts both the miracle and the true consequences of the Jewish state, one that will bring American Jews closer to the real Israel and Israelis closer to their own lost narrative….
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Who Is Mystery Woman in Iconic Photo of Old Jordan Valley?
(Haaretz) — Photography researcher Guy Raz has spent the past few months going through 50,000 negatives of old pictures for a new exhibition he’s curating that will display, among other items, old photos taken in the Jordan Valley. In the midst of his work, he came upon a series of mysterious photographs of an unknown…
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Did Adam and Eve Speak Hebrew in the Garden of Eden?
An article recently posted in the online Jewish magazine Tablet is titled “Examining Edenics, the Theory That English (and Every Other Language) Came From Hebrew”; it bears the subtitle “An eccentric Jerusalem-based researcher believes he’s found the key to the origin of tongues — in the Bible.” The “guru of Edenics,” as the Tablet article…
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Books Scholastic Puts Israel Back on ‘Stilton’ Map
Scholastic had already apologized for publishing a children’s book in its popular Geronimo Stilton series that included a map of the Middle East leaving out Israel. Stung by the fierce reaction, the publishing giant has gone one step further. It reworked the animated map to include Israel. It also told parents it would replace copies…
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Seeking Harmony and Finding Transcendence at The Cloisters
Janet Cardiff’s “The Forty Part Motet” is a transcendent work of art. Consisting of forty speakers arranged in an oval, each playing the separately recorded voice of a member of a choir, it envelops the listener in a sea of sound. And now, installed (until December 8) in a reconstructed 12th century church at The…
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Jews Join Nation in Mourning Assasination of President John F. Kennedy
1913 •100 years ago More Blood Libels in the Wake of Beilis Verdict In the wake of the “Not guilty” verdict in the Beilis blood libel trial, Russian anti-Semites are furious and have stepped up their activities. They are spreading lies and rumors in their newspapers — for example, stating that Jews had bribed the…
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The Best Little (Dysfunctional Jewish) Strip Club in Toronto
It’s one of the most instantly recognizable Jewish narratives of the 20th century: Two high schoolers – one an impoverished immigrant with an Old World accent that 50 years in the New World will be unable to fade, and the other the child of holocaust survivors — meet in the 1970s and fall in love….
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Canada Urged To Recognize Jewish Refugees From Arab Lands
A Canadian parliamentary committee called on the government to recognize the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. A report from the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development recommends that Ottawa “officially recognize the experience of Jewish refugees who were displaced from states in the Middle East and North Africa after 1948.” It…
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To Adapt a ‘Book Thief
Based on Australian author Markus Zusak’s best-selling 2006 novel of the same name, the movie “The Book Thief” concerns a young German girl who finds solace in purloined literature and befriends the Jewish refugee her family hides in their cellar. The film stars Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson as the foster parents of Liesel (Sophie…
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