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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Anya Ulinich Makes Her Graphic Debut
Although her mother hasn’t read her new book, Anya Ulinich already fears the worst. When Ulinich was in the early stages of writing the novel two years ago, her mother begged her to stop. “She hates the idea of this book,” Ulinich said. Ulinich’s novel, “Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel” isn’t a salacious memoir. It’s a…
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Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’ Captures the Spirit of the Time
One of the great productive tensions between Jewish tradition and contemporary spirituality is that between time and the timeless. On the one hand, the passage of time is central in Judaism. Some of this time passes in a linear fashion — we age along with life-cycle events , from birth to death — and some…
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Avery Corman’s Bronx Tale
As Avery Corman and I sit on a bench outside of the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage in the Bronx, I use the term “fairy tale” to describe the setting of his new memoir “My Old Neighborhood Remembered.” Corman, author of the novels “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Oh, God” among other books, smiles when he hears…
The Latest
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Woody Allen’s ‘Magic in the Moonlight’ Will Be Forgotten Soon
Woody Allen should have quit while he was ahead. I admit it’s hard to say when that was. Would it have been in the late 1980s, after the dark and soulful “Crimes and Misdemeanors”? Was it in the late ’90s, after “Sweet and Lowdown,” starring an incomparable Sean Penn? Or was it earlier in this…
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Film & TV VIDEO: How To Fight Voyeurism in Gaza
When some of us hear “Gaza,” we picture bombs or rockets or rubble. What if, instead, we pictured an adorable little girl in a pink hat? Or a grandfather playing with his grandchild? Or young men handing out ice cream cones? A new short film by Palestinian filmmaker Hadeel Assali is an ingenious exercise in…
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Why Amos Oz, Israeli Author and Peace Activist, Can’t Hide From Rockets of Gaza
When air raid sirens sound in Israel, some disabled and elderly residents are unable to take shelter before the missiles land. One of them is named Amos Oz. Oz, Israel’s renowned man of letters, is confined to his bed in a Tel Aviv hospital following knee surgery. With only one-and-a-half minutes of warning before the…
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Actually, Toto, We Are Still In Kansas
The morning of the annual Old Mission Hills Fourth of July Party, I warned Adharsh, my boyfriend at the time who was visiting from New Orleans, about what to expect.” “We’re kind of going to stick out,” I said. “My family, I mean. We always do.” “Speak for yourself,” he said, grinning. “I came prepared.”…
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8 Things About Jews In Kansas
1) Approximately 17,775 Jews live in Kansas. 2) The nation’s only Kansas City Barbeque Society-sanctioned kosher barbecue festival takes place in Kansas City. 3) The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education was founded by Holocaust survivors, Isak Federman and Jack Mandelbaum, and is located in Overland Park, Kansas. 4) 2,000 Jews attend the University of Kansas….
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Getting Back to the Garden (of Eden)
Looking at an image of a serpent encircling an apple branch, most of us will think of the snake from the Garden of Eden. In popular lore, Adam and Eve’s consumption of the taboo meal from the illicit Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as it is called in the Bible, resulted in their…
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My Hunt for the Cossacks in Ukraine
For no particular reason, I find myself attending a service in a Budapest church that is rumored to be associated with the far-right Jobbik party. There’s no cross in this church, only flags, and quite many of them, depicting Hungary in various historical stages. Some of the flags contain the so-called Árpád stripes, which opponents…
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Lee Grant Said Yes to Everything — Except McCarthyism
I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir By Lee Grant Blue Rider Press, 480 pages, $28.95 Oscar-winning American Jewish actress Lee Grant is one of the rare performers (along with Zero Mostel) to have eventually triumphed over the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. She did so through a combination of fierce determination, zesty…
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