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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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…
The Latest
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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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The Jewish Inventor of the Bra
(Haaretz) — January 9, 1886, is the birthdate of Ida Cohen Rosenthal, the co-founder of Maidenform, today the world’s largest manufacturer of “shapewear.” She was born Ida Kaganovich (she anglicized her maiden name to “Cohen” after coming to the United States) in the town of Rakaw, in what is today Belarus. Her father, Abraham Kaganovich, was…
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Plans for Soviet Jewish Autonomous Region a Failure
1913 •100 years ago Jewish Gangsters Held for Murder “Dopey Benny” Fein, Waxey Gordon, “Little Abie” Beckerman and Reuven Kaplan were the four gangsters arrested on charges of killing an innocent bystander, Frederick Strauss, near Arlington Hall on St. Mark’s Place, in Manhattan’s East Village. The gangsters are being held and their lawyers have demanded…
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Books Gary Shteyngart Insults Canadian Authors
There’s never been any kind of publicity author Gary Shteyngart hasn’t liked, but it seems the same cannot be said about Canadian fiction. The Russian-American writer, currently making the rounds on a book tour for his new memoir, “Little Failure,” managed to dis the oeuvre of writers north of the border while being interviewed by…
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End of Loehmann’s Is End of an Era
The news that Loehmann’s, the grandmother of discount clothing emporia, is closing its doors caught me by surprise and saddened me, too. It shouldn’t have. After all, apart from the occasional purchase of a pair of socks, I hadn’t shopped there in years, nor did any of my fashion-minded confrères. A casualty of online shopping,…
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The Problem With ‘Girls’ Is Men
I am not a girl, but “Girls” is about me. Like the characters on the HBO show — which begins its third season January 12 — I am in my 20s, white, middle class and live in Brooklyn. I work in a creative field, have friends who are actors and baristas, and sometimes, to my…
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Books Rolling Stone Writer Pens Lou Reed Biography
The life and times of the late rocker Lou Reed will be detailed in a biography that will be penned by Rolling Stone magazine writer Will Hermes, publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux said on Wednesday. Reed, the frontman of the 1960s influential band The Velvet Underground, died of liver disease last October at the age…
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