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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What Cornelius Gurlitt Could Have Learned From Monsieur Robert Klein
Until recently, Cornelius Gurlitt, 80, possessed 1,280 pieces of art — some already known to be major works — which he kept wrapped and stored in his apartment in Munich. He enjoyed the cache, but only furtively; the man was in hiding alongside his art. Now that he’s been flushed out and interviewed, Gurlitt comes…
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Stuck Inside of Greenwich Village With the Coen Brothers Blues Again
Success always seems inevitable in retrospect. Once you’ve arrived, it must have been destined all along. But failure — especially dream-crushing, life-destroying failure — is plagued by what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. Was it just bad luck, or did you really not have what it takes? Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), the tortured protagonist of Joel and Ethan…
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In Pursuing Bob Dylan for Hate Speech, Croatian Group Denies Holocaust
Bob Dylan uttered hate speech?! Not so fast. In fact, it’s his accusers are engaged in hate speech: specifically, denying the Holocaust. The blogosphere was abuzz with the news Tuesday that Dylan was being investigated by French authorities for comments he’d made in a Rolling Stone magazine interview, published in English in September, 2012, and…
The Latest
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Books Remembering Israeli Literature’s Only Nobel Laureate
Sitting in a lecture hall in the Talpiot section of Jerusalem, a group of 25 immigrants is discussing “A City and Its Fullness” (“Ir U’meloah” in Hebrew), a collection of 150 stories by Shai Agnon about the author’s ancestral home of Buczacz, located in present-day Ukraine. The meeting, part of a five-week course titled “Agnon’s…
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Books André Schiffrin, the Publisher Who Knew When the Party Was Over
André Schiffrin, who died on December 1 of pancreatic cancer at age 78, made a lasting impression as longtime managing director of publishing at Pantheon Books, followed by his co-founding The New Press, a not-for-profit. Yet as Schiffrin, born in France of Russian Jewish origin, recounted in his memoir, “A Political Education: Coming of Age…
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‘Tent’ Creates At-Home Birthright for Jewish Culture
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. In 2013, The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., launched an ambitious series of cultural programming aimed at providing an opportunity for young Jews to learn about modern Jewish culture. The weeklong program, “Tent,” brings together 20 young people aged 21 to 30 in order to…
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Meet the Fifth (Jewish) Beatle — Manager Brian Epstein
In his 1964 autobiography, written three years before he died, at the age of 32, Beatles manager Brian Epstein recalled feeling the weight of his lineage as he sought a balance between the wishes of his Orthodox Jewish parents and the aspects of his life that were increasingly incongruent with their traditional values. “I am…
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Deconstructing an Older Sarah Silverman
Around the middle of Sarah Silverman’s new HBO comedy special, “We Are Miracles,” the famously long-necked comedian tells a 39-member audience at Los Angeles’s Largo nightclub about a recent study done by the University of North Carolina, in which it was discovered that “9/11 widows give great hand jobs.” The audience laughs, and laughs again,…
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Why Bambi Is the Most Jewish Deer in Disneyland
What could be more Jewish than an animated, doe-eyed fawn gallivanting around the forest with pals Thumper the hare and Flower the skunk? The question may sound ridiculous, but it becomes more serious when you consider the release date of the film “Bambi” — August 13, 1942. And then there are the hunters and forest…
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Why Thanksgivukkah Is a Portmanteau — and What That Means
Given all the hoopla surrounding it, it’s surprising that only one reader has written in about “Thanksgivukkah,” the word coined for this year’s coinciding of Thanksgiving dinner with the first night of Hanukkah. The reader is Amy Mintz of Sugar Hill, N.H., who complains: “This is such an assimilated-sounding combination! And it’s hardly a combination….
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Beloved Israeli Director Shemi Zarhin Tries His Hand at Fiction
● Some Day By Shemi Zarhin, translated by Yardenne Greenspan New Vessel Press, 450 pages, $16.99 The director and writer of some of the most memorable and honored Israeli films, including “Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi,” “Aviva My Love” and “The World Is Funny,” Shemi Zarhin creates a world in his movies. And now, in his first…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish קען מען זײַן פֿרום און פּאָליטיש לינק־געשטימט? איין אָרגאַניזאַציע זאָגט אַז יאָCan an observant Jew be politically left? This organization says yes
אויף דער קאָנפֿערענץ האָט מען געזוכט אין דער הלכה יענע פּרינציפּן װאָס זײַנען נישט נאַציאָנאַליסטיש, נאָר הומאַניסטיש און מאָראַליש.
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Antisemitism Decoded Columbia’s settlement won’t solve its campus crisis. Here’s what could.
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Culture It’s a classic Yiddish saying — but did it come from a biblical story about Jesus?
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Fast Forward New York Times adds editors’ note to front-page image of emaciated Gaza toddler after backlash
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