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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How Doris Day and Miss Clairol Helped Jews Join the Mainstream
A few months ago, I happened across a reference to the late 19th century notion that the Jews suffered disproportionately from colorblindness. This malady, it was argued at the time, explained a lot about them, most especially their putative penchant for things bold and flashy or what we today would most likely call “bling.” Whether…
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Barbie’s Ongoing Adventures in Sponsorship
February 13, 2014 “The reality is, we just didn’t sell enough Barbie Dolls.” — Bryan G. Stockton, chief executive of Mattel, shortly before the Barbie brand joined forces with Sports Illustrated’s anniversary swimsuit issue. Mattel paid for the “opportunity” to appear in the issue according to The New York Times and has used #unapologetic to…
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Jan Koum, WhatsApp and the Meaning of ‘The Walls Have Ears’
Benjamin Lerner writes about an interview he came across in the media with Jan Koum, the rags-to-riches Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union who founded WhatsApp and recently sold it to Facebook for a reported $19 billion dollars. Referring to WhatsApp’s emphasis on privacy in its social network, Koum said: “I grew up in…
The Latest
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A Coupla Jewish Writers Talk Theater, Drinking and Escaping the Midwest
Over the past 15 years or so, Brooke Berman has built a reputation as one of the funniest and most emotionally honest playwrights of her generation. Her often autobiographical work includes “Hunting and Gathering,” which received a celebrated production at Primary Stages in 2008, as well as “Smashing,” “Until We Find Each Other,” and “The…
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Landmark Study: Jews Agree, Disagree
In a landmark study carried out this year by the nation’s leading conductor of surveys, the findings are clear that Jews both agree and, perhaps more surprisingly, disagree. The response to the study has been mixed. The Jewish media has responded with ambivalence. Some Jewish bloggers have expressed vehement agreement while others have written about…
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A Megillah Free From Temptation
Paid advertisement for good kosher product Gentlemen, have you ever found yourself turned on by promiscuous images of Queen Esther on Purim night? Or, perhaps, Queen Vashti before she grew a tail and refused to chow down on Accutane? Now, with “Kosher Megillah,” you will no longer need to position your scroll to conceal your…
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92Y Cancels Spinoza Talk, Cites BDS
Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza has been disinvited by the 92nd St Y. from giving his talk “Why I am a Heretic and Abjure Traditional Judaism.” According to event organizers the lecture has been cancelled because he has, in the past, failed to disown the BDS movement. This isn’t the first time Spinoza has courted controversy….
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The Haredi Sect Run By Women
Chaya and Mushke Bath-Sheleg, the daughters of a highly respected rabbi and rebbetzin in the Memeti sect have been leading a growing community of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn since their parents’ death in the late 1990s. On the eve of their community’s historic move to Kiryas Shalom in upstate New York they broke their silence…
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Were They Heroes or Were They Collaborators?
The 1940, Nazi invasion of France turned that country’s musical scene into a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. “Music in Paris During the Occupation,”) a book recently released in France, allows readers to draw conclusions about how music world celebrities behaved in difficult times. Edited by Myriam Chimènes and Yannick Simon,…
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Gary Shteyngart’s Schechter School Tale of Woe
(JTA) — If it is true that there is no such thing as bad publicity, then Gary Shteyngart may be one of the best things to happen to the Conservative movement’s at-times-beleaguered Schechter Day School Network. Shteyngart, the Soviet Jewish immigrant writer known for acclaimed comic novels like “Absurdistan” and “Super Sad True Love Story,”…
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Painting Inspires Dialogue Between Jews and Catholics in Poland
One could not be unmoved when a group of young clerics from the local Catholic seminary sang a popular Israeli song in Hebrew, “Hevenu Shalom Aleikhem” (“We Brought Peace”), during a Catholic service in a small (and in January very sleepy) town in southeastern Poland. The Israeli ambassador to Poland, Zvi Rav Ner, could be…
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