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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How I Won a Marathon in Israel
There are two Meccas, one in Saudi Arabia and the other, you’ll never guess, in Israel. The one in Saudi Arabia is for Muslim pilgrims, the one in Israel is for journalists. There are more journalists in this little part of the world than cats. And, believe you me, there is no place on the…
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Is ‘Quenelle’ Backwards Version of Nazi Salute?
By now you may think you’ve heard or read all you want to about the quenelle, the double hand movement that was popularized by the French comedian Dieudonné and has been all over the news since the French soccer star Nicolas Anelka performed it after scoring a goal in a game in England on December…
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The Secret Jewish History of Downton Abbey
Millions of TV viewers across the world continue to be enthralled by “Downton Abbey.” The BBC series chronicles the lives of an Edwardian noble family — and their host of loyal servants — forced to adjust to modernity as it ends the Victorian era and ushers in the revolutionary changes brought on by World War…
The Latest
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Haim Hears a Who as Dr. Seuss Musical Comes to Israel
(Haaretz) — Almost no work of children’s literature can compare with the books of Dr. Seuss. Their words and illustrations carry abundant possibilities, as well as an invitation to other creative artists to take inspiration from them and run with it. Anyone who has read Dr. Seuss’s works knows about the places you’ll go when…
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Rescued Auschwitz Opera ‘The Passenger’ Gets Long-Awaited Premiere in Houston
For nearly half a century, “The Passenger,” a gripping opera set in Auschwitz, lay dormant. Commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre in the former Soviet Union, it was supposed to receive its premiere in 1968, but that never happened. “Soviet authorities didn’t think a piece about Jews would further the interests of the communist state,” said…
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Dreyfus Affair Continues To Intrigue and Confound After a Century
● An Officer and a Spy By Robert Harris Knopf, 448 pages, $27.95 ● Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century By Ruth Harris Picador, 572 pages, $28 Why is it that people named Harris tend to have affairs with the Dreyfus Affair? Just three years ago, the British historian Ruth Harris published…
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For Jana Herzen, Jazzy Creativity Is in Jewish Bloodline
Jana Herzen, whose jazz record label Motéma Music celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2013, confides that the Forward played an important role in her family history. Her great-grandmother walked out on her family when Herzen’s grandmother, the eldest of six, was 11. One day she just disappeared from their home in the Bronx and was…
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Inventor of X-Rated Animation Ralph Bakshi Makes a Comeback
Ralph Bakshi’s Best Jewish Moments from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo. I was on the phone with Ralph Bakshi when he told me who killed John F. Kennedy. Long story short: It was the mob. “With Johnson’s OK, I guess,” Bakshi said. “That’s my take on it. The fact that Kennedy got shot in the…
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In Defense of Amiri Baraka
A lot of people are going to be writing hagiographies of Amiri Baraka, who died on January 9, at the age of 79. A lot of other people are going to be painting him as a hateful, irredeemable anti-Semite. The truth is that Baraka wrote some of the greatest plays and poems of the post-war…
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Recounting a Tale of Counting and Telling
In the wake of my December 13, 2013, column on gematria, the rabbinic art of finding significance in the numerical value of the letters of Hebrew words, Rabbi Carl M. Perkins has sent me an article of his about the existence of gematria already in the Bible. In it, the Dutch Bible scholar Casper Labuschagne…
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Math and Anti-Semitism Went Hand-in-Hand at Harvard for Decades
A History in Sum: 150 Years of Mathematics at Harvard (1825-1975) By Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau Harvard University Press, 280 pages, $39.95 For over three decades, the math department at Harvard was ruled by a man whom Albert Einstein called “one of the world’s great anti-Semites.” This is one of the key revelations in…
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