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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‘The Search’ Relives Auschwitz — in Chechnya
In 1948, Hollywood director Fred Zinnemann travelled to postwar Germany to film “The Search,” a melodrama about a Czech mother and son who survive Auschwitz and look for each other amid the ruins of the Third Reich. The film is best remembered today for Montgomery Clift’s nuanced portrayal of a GI who looks after the…
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Books Jennifer Weiner Questions Genre and Gender in the Literary World
Most people who recognize Jennifer Weiner know her as an author of fiction aimed at women, a writer whose pastel-covered covers perennially crowd the best-seller list and command an audience most novelists would salivate over. She has written 11 books and had one made into a rom-com starring Cameron Diaz (the 2005 film “In Her…
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An Atheist’s Case for Talmud
When I recently wrote my memoir of leaving ultra-Orthodoxy, I spent days ravaged by sobbing fits, debilitating chest pain, and migraines as I reencountered the trauma my 17-year-old self had experienced after I was pushed out of my yeshivish family for my rebellion. Shaken, I was fearful that when I went even further back to…
The Latest
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Film & TV Remembering the Life and Films of Paul Mazursky
The critic Irving Howe was not thinking of the writer-director Paul Mazursky, who has died at the age of 84, when he wrote of Jewish humor: “Laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relation between the two.” Yet he might as well have been. Born Irwin Mazursky…
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Israel and Circumcision Top List of Concerns in New ‘Pewish’ Plays
The Pew Survey of American Jewry came as a shock to the chattering classes (or kibbitzing classes) of professional Jews, the pundits, academics and culture boosters that make a living by analyzing or promoting Judaism, myself included. Of course, anybody with eyes could see that interest in the religion has dwindled and many American Jews…
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Hey Baby, It’s the 4th Of Jew-ly!
When it comes to popular patriotic American songs written by Jews, “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin certainly stands at the top of the list; it isn’t, on the other hand, particularly festive. If you want to soundtrack your Fourth of July cookout with tunes by Jewish artists that are appropriately star-spangled, and haven’t already…
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Music African Migrants Camp Out at Egypt Border After Israeli Detention Walk-Out
More than 1,000 illegal African migrants have been camping out near the border with Egypt to protest their treatment in Israel. The migrants walked out of Israel’s Holot detention center on Friday, and attempted to cross into Egypt, according to reports. The Israel Defense Forces prevented them from crossing the border. The migrants, mostly from…
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Circassian: A Most Difficult Language
The other day, I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office in Haifa, when three people walked in and sat behind me. Two were men dressed in Western clothes, one looking to be in his 30s and the other in his 50s or 60s; the third was a woman in her 20s of…
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A Holocaust Romance Tied to a Necklace, Filled With Clichés
Love and Treasure By Ayelet Waldman Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95 A historical novel, the Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács argued, should reach only as far backwards as the era of the author’s grandparents. That is because novelists build not balanced panoramas, but rather individual portraits. Real human beings are unrealistic, because they are improbably idiosyncratic….
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Palestine Jews on Lockdown Following Violence
1914 • 100 years ago Betrayed by Sister and Husband Nine years ago, Sam and Ida Weiner were married and living happily in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he worked as a carpenter in a trim factory. The Weiners had three lovely children: 7-year-old Rosie, 5-year-old Sam and 2-year-old Saraleh. About nine months ago,…
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An Empty Bob Dylan Biography
Dylan: The Biography By Dennis McDougal Turner Publishing Company, 540 pages, $35 ‘What is this sh–?” Greil Marcus famously asked in his Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan’s most reviled album, “Self Portrait.” Throughout my reading of “Dylan: The Biography,” by Dennis McDougal, I’ve been asking myself the same question. It purports to be “the…
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