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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Israel’s Protest Queen Daphni Leef Isn’t Prime Minister — Yet
In summer of 2011, Daphni Leef’s apartment lease expired but she failed to find a new, affordable rental. Forced to leave her abode, Daphni pitched a tent on the luxurious Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, igniting a social protest that eventually saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking over streets all over the land, pitching…
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Books What Gabriel Garcia Marquez Taught Me
It is a well-known fact that young men under 18 embrace literature primarily to impress the girls they are trying to seduce. You had to congratulate my ambition: A Soviet-Jewish immigrant kid with funny hair and funnier clothes after an American-born, Catholic, Colombian beauty whom I’ll call C. But I had a secret weapon: the…
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One For the (Vinyl) Record Books
When Eilon Paz came to Brooklyn in 2008, he was looking for more work as a freelance photographer. Though he’d established himself in his native Israel shooting travel and food features, the move was hardly easy — he arrived at the height of the recession. “I came here with nothing. I had no job. I…
The Latest
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John Turturro’s Hasidic Rom-Com
A romantic comedy is a fantasy about love. It’s a fantasy of finding love, of love overcoming the odds, of love doing away with any other difficulty that life might present. At the end of the movie, when the guy and the girl decide they can’t exist without each other, we know they’re going to…
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Ab Cahan’s Ghost Returns in Cartoon Form
● A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York By Liana Finck Ecco, 128 pages, $17.99 The advice column known as “A Bintel Brief,” meaning “a bundle of letters,” was the brainchild of Abraham Cahan, the founder of the Forverts, the original Yiddish-language incarnation of this very publication. In 1906, when the paper…
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Books A Soviet Journey to Adulthood
Ellen Litman dreamed of being a writer when she went to school in Moscow in the 1980s. There was only one problem: She was Jewish, and thus she was advised to focus on something more practical, since in the Soviet Union, Jews couldn’t be successful at writing. Litman studied math and computer programming, and immigrated…
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Doomed Jewish Freedom Fighter’s Journey From Tel Aviv to Auschwitz
(Haaretz) — For decades, no one took an interest in the seven letters, handwritten in Polish and kept in the home of Priva and Jacob Bendet. They had been sent in the 1930s to Priva, at her home in Tel Aviv, by her sister Lusia, from Warsaw and from Paris. “One letter led to the…
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How Alfred Dreyfus Laid the Foundations for Blogging and Social Networking
Revising Dreyfus Edited by Maya Balakirsky Katz Brill, 438 pages, $209 The public trial for treason of French Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus has proven fodder for everything from anti-Semitic walking cane handles to a riot-inducing 1931 play and another play in 1974, which the New York Times panned as a flop. Roman Polanski is reportedly…
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Lars Von Trier’s ‘Nymph()maniac’ Is Uncomfortable But Thought-Provoking
For those still brooding over the Woody Allen scandal, consider those of us who are fans of Lars von Trier. Von Trier is not a 78-year-old comic with a single crime, alleged to have taken place twenty years ago, never proven, and dismissed by law enforcement. He is a complicated, depressed, brilliant, misunderstood, controversial filmmaker…
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Why We’re Living in the Golden Age of Jewish Baseball
Jewish museums in the United States often walk a tightrope when planning special exhibitions: Should they focus exclusively on the Jewish experience or study other ethnic communities as well? The former approach risks parochialism, while the latter would make the museum’s focus overly broad. In its new exhibit on Jews and baseball, “Chasing Dreams: Baseball…
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Why Jews Suffer From a Quilt Complex
The much-vaunted distinctiveness of the Jews resides in what they eat, how they attend to their prayers, and the means by which they earn their keep. Their distinctiveness, as it turns out, is a matter of textiles, too. No, I don’t have in mind Torah mantles or challah covers, but something far more quotidian: bedding….
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