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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If You Don’t Know the Way to Hell, You Can Find It on a Map
George Jochnowitz writes about “gehenna,” an English synonym for “hell” that comes, via Greek and Latin, from the Hebrew word gehinnom. This in turn derives from gey ben hinnom, “the valley of the son of Hinnom” (or simply “the Valley of Hinnom,” as it is known in English), which is the biblical name of a…
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What If World War I Had Never Happened?
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I By Richard Ned Lebow Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $27 In the introduction to his new book, “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I,” Richard Ned Lebow discloses a poignant personal reason for his interest in counterfactual history. The professor of international political…
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American Protection for Mexican Oil Fields
1913 •100 years ago Military Protection for Mexican Oil Fields The latest news about Mexico makes it clear why such a murderous patriotism is being heated up and instigated in America: It’s cooking on an oil fire. Human blood must flow so that the oil supply will grow – in the tanks of the company…
The Latest
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Music Roger Waters Urges Rolling Stones To Boycott Israel
Two founding members of the Pink Floyd rock band called on their colleagues from The Rolling Stones to cancel a concert in Israel. Roger Waters and Nick Mason made the call in an op-ed that was published Thursday on Salon.com. “Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of…
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The Cross-Dressing Racecar Driver Who Aided the Nazis (It’s Mostly True!)
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 By Francine Prose Harper, 448 pages, $26.99 The plot of Francine Prose’s new novel, “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,” sounds, in an admittedly reductive summary, slightly preposterous: A cross-dressing French lesbian racecar driver collaborates with the Nazis, revealing where the Maginot Line ends, thus enabling the…
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‘Ida’ Revisits Poland in the Shadow of the Holocaust
Pawel Pawlikowski left Poland at the age of 14, but his childhood memories of his homeland never left him. It’s no surprise then that “Ida,” a stunning portrait of two very different women whose lives intersect in 1960s Poland, is the director’s most assured and confident narrative feature yet. The film takes place in the…
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Books The Joys of Amos Oz at 75
In Amos Oz’s “Rhyming Life and Death” it’s a sticky night in Tel Aviv, and the Author is to give a reading. Surveying the room, he begins to fashion life stories for the people attending. He takes note of a boy of about 16, moving restlessly in his chair. “He looks unhappy,” the Author thinks….
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Music There’s No Storm in Sight But Clouds Loom for Israel as Peace Talks Collapse
With even the illusion of a peace process now dead, experts’ predictions of what will fill the vacuum range from a new intifada to continued peace and prosperity for Israel. Israel is, in other words, now on untested ground, and what the future holds is anyone’s guess. Still, some of those guessing about the new…
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When Diane Arbus Met a Giant in Her Field
Diane Arbus’s “Jewish Giant,” the second installment in the Jewish Museum’s innovative Masterpieces & Curiosities series, is an entire show dedicated to interrogating the competing meanings contained within a single photograph by Diane Arbus. The photo itself, “A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y, 1970,” is mounted in a vitrine…
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Music Basketball World Unites in Cheering Ban of Donald Sterling
The basketball world was united in their support for NBA Commissioner Adam Silver following his decision to ban Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life and fine him $2.5 million for racist comments. Past and present players and other team owners all voiced their approval after Silver effectively booted Sterling out of the game,…
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Making a Mockery of Hitler’s Mockery of Degenerate Art
When I looked for the first time at the painting that used to hang above Adolf Hitler’s mantel, I felt weirdly emotionless. It’s a triptych called “The Four Elements,” painted by Adolf Ziegler, and it displays four fair-haired naked women representing fire, water, soil and air. It can currently be viewed in New York City,…
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Yiddish פֿאַר וואָס הערט מען ניט וועגן דעם גלעצנדיקן וווּקס פֿון דער ישׂראל־בערזע? Why aren’t we hearing about the dramatic growth of the Israeli stock market?
וואָלט דער אָפּרוף געווען אַנדערש, ווען דער ציל פֿון די טעראָריסטן וואָלט ניט געווען ייִדן, נאָר אַן אַנדער גרופּע?
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