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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Is the World Gonna End in 2014?
This may seem odd, but a surprisingly large chunk of the Western World believed we wouldn’t get to see 2013, purely because that’s what the Mayans thought. Most of these people never did anything else that Mayans did — never ate human flesh, for example, or at least never offered to pay for it. So…
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Why Gary Shteyngart Remains His Own Best Creation
Little Failure By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 368 pages, $27 It was perhaps inevitable that Gary Shteyngart would one day write a memoir. Like other authors who traffic in fiction that is thinly-veiled autobiography — or, as in Shtyengart’s case, that appears as shadow puppet projections of his own Russian Jewish immigrant story — the…
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How Jewish Museums Are Expanding Into the Digital Universe
Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts released some preliminary findings from its 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. The survey found that more than two-thirds of American adults accessed art via electronic media, including handheld mobile devices and the Internet. This information came as no surprise to the most widely known…
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The Secret Jewish History of Cher
In the beginning, there was Cher. And the Lord saw that Cher was good, and so He made Madonna. And Britney. And Gaga. And Miley. And then, exhausted, spent, and depressed about twerking, He went back to the drawing board and breathed new life into Cher… again. We’re on the verge of yet another Cher…
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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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Opinion A Reichstag fire is blazing in Trump’s America and we know exactly who is fanning the flames
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Yiddish נײַ בוך וועגן אַמאָליקן ניו־יאָרק איז ווי אַ סעודה פֿאַר ייִדישיסטןNew book about old New York City is like a feast for Yiddishists
דער מחבר הענעך סאַפּאָזשניק איז אַ גאָר פֿעיִקער װעגװײַזער איבער אַ פֿאַרלוירענער װעלט.
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Fast Forward Philadelphia Jewish museum won’t re-hang Israeli flag now after it was vandalized twice in a week
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Fast Forward Two congregations, two opinions as Torahs hit the floor at separate NYC services
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