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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A Good Season To Live High on the ‘Khoge’
Just in time for the last week of December, Beth Kissileff has a query about the Yiddish word khoge, which denotes a non-Jewish holiday. Does it, she asks, refer only to a religious holiday like Christmas, or does it also include “civic holidays” like Thanksgiving and New Year’s? Since civic holidays did not exist in…
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Why Urban Preservation Is the Trend To Watch in 2014
When Tamara Greenfield received her master’s degree in urban planning from Hunter College in 2000, she felt somewhat lonely in her desire to combine her new profession with the arts. “It was hard to find a lot of people looking at the intersection of art and culture in the urban environment — which seems weird…
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The Best Jewish Film Festivals of 2014
In his classic 1988 account of Hollywood’s Jewish roots, ‘“An Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler argued convincingly that Hollywood (and therefore, world cinema as we know it) would not exist today without the contributions of the Jewish pioneers and studio heads who first turned movies into our country’s great popular art form. But if…
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Organizers Prepare Palestinian Museum For 2015 Opening
2014 will see intensified preparations for the projected April 2015 opening of the Palestinian Museum, which will be the biggest museum devoted to Palestinian culture and identity. Since last April’s groundbreaking ceremony for the 3,000-square-meter project — the size of half a regulation soccer field — director and head curator Jack Persekian has been busy…
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Two World Wars Face Major Milestones in 2014
Numerologists and war buffs have much to anticipate this year thanks to an unusual confluence of commemorative events. 2014 marks both the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I and the 75th anniversary of the start of World War II. Given the enormous attention that numerically significant anniversaries have acquired in Western culture,…
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The Russian (Authors) Are Coming
One thing we know for sure is that 2014 will be a big year for young post-Soviet Jews who write in English. Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming memoir, which he did not title “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Jewness,” has already called attention to itself with a four-minute video that almost but not quite redeems the genre…
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Keep Your Eye on Nikki Yanofsky in 2014
Nikki Yanofsky seems preternaturally destined for global stardom. At the age of 12, she was spotted singing with her father’s garage band at a charity event for a Jewish geriatric center and was immediately invited to perform at the opening concert of the 2006 Montreal International Jazz Festival before a crowd of 125,000. Since then,…
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How Ileana Sonnabend Became MoMA’s Ambassador of the New
It sounds like the beginning of a riddle, or the setup for a logic problem. How to reconcile these two facts: (1) Ileana Sonnabend was not an artist; (2) the Museum of Modern Art is devoting a small but significant show to Ileana Sonnabend and anointing her “ambassador for the new.” Actually, the distance between…
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How an Israeli Teenage Jazz Star Emerged
Viewed from the upper-level seats in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room, Gadi Lehavi cut a slight figure. Seated at the piano, he seemed to disappear beneath a mop of unruly hair. But when he started to play, a giant-in-the-making emerged — and a moment was defined for the millennial generation of Israeli jazz musicians….
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Why a Jewish Manager Might Win World Series For First Time Since 1948
In November of last year, when Brad Ausmus was hired to be the new manager of the Detroit Tigers, a major milestone in Jewish baseball history was achieved. In addition to becoming the first Jewish skipper in the 119-year saga of one of baseball’s oldest and most respected franchises, Ausmus is also only the sixth…
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When Jews and Blacks Got Along Better Than Ever — in Hip-Hop World
History tends to treat the largely cordial relationship between African-Americans and Jews as a thing that ended around 1991, in Crown Heights. But in 2013, hip-hop was one place where Jews and African Americans got along just fine. Some of the most talked about releases in hip-hop this year were recorded by Jewish artists: Drake,…
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