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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A Talking Trove of Interviews as AJC Oral History Goes Online
Ever wonder what Detroit Tigers’ slugger Hank Greenberg really had to say about anti-Semitism? Or how Congresswoman Bella Abzug felt about sexual discrimination? From the late 1960s to 1990, some 2,000 people were interviewed for the American Jewish Committee’s William E. Wiener Oral History Library. Recorded on audiocassette, these interviews comprised more than 6,000 hours…
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Books The Author as Therapist for her Characters
Literature is in Zeruya Shalev’s genes. Born in Kvutzat Kinneret in 1959 — a kibbutz by the shores of the Galilee where the songwriter Naomi Shemer was also born — Shalev grew up with a father who was a literary critic and an uncle who was a poet. Her cousin is the acclaimed novelist Meir…
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The Surprising Jewish Flavor of Hayao Miyazaki, King of Japanese Animation
There is much that is unusual about Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, which the master says will be his last. It takes place in our own world, not the mythical past of “Princess Mononoke” or the magical universe of “Spirited Away.” It has a mostly adult, male protagonist, unlike those in many of Miyazaki’s other movies….
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Music Ukraine Rabbis Meet John Kerry in Kiev
Top leaders of Ukraine’s Jewish community joined Secretary of State John Kerry near Kiev’s Independence Square yesterday to commemorate demonstrators who were killed protesting their government last month. In an email to the Forward, the country’s Reform Chief Rabbi Alexander Dukhovny said that he presented a book entitled “Jewish Wisdom” to the secretary of state…
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Is There an E.L. Doctorow in the House?
Andrew’s Brain: A Novel By E.L. Doctorow Random House, $26, 224 pages Is it just me, or does the idea of psychotherapy seem sort of hopelessly 20th century? All those not-quite-hours; all that money; all that talk talk talk talk talk — all to unearth, finally, the tiniest molecules of self-knowledge. Doesn’t it seem a…
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Remembering Alain Resnais and His Complex Relationship With Jews
The French film director Alain Resnais, who died on March 1 at age 91, had a complex relationship with Jews. For many years, his 1955 film “Night and Fog” was shown in classrooms as an approach to understanding the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Yet Resnais’s aims were both more and less than this purpose,…
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Is Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s ‘The Passenger’ Only Holocaust Opera ‘Worth Watching’
Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s parents and sister died in a concentration camp, his Yiddish-language actor father-in-law was killed on Stalin’s orders and the Polish-born composer himself was imprisoned by the KGB and only released after Stalin’s death. His moving Holocaust opera “The Passenger”, which revolves around a former camp guard who recognises a former inmate on an…
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A Glimpse of Jewish Warsaw
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here Menachem Kipnis is known to Jewish history as a cultural figure who worked across several fields. Born in Uzhmir, Ukraine in 1878, Kipnis distinguished himself as a singer, ethnomusicologist and journalist. As a singer he was the first Jewish tenor in the Warsaw Opera (1902-1918) and…
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Music Americans in Israel Targeted by IRS for Tax Audits
This upcoming tax season entails some unpleasant surprises for United States citizens who either live in Israel or who hold bank accounts there. Filing requirements for these Americans have become more rigorous and the odds of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service are higher than they’ve ever been. In fact, tax accountants working in…
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A Personal History of Blood Libel in Poland
Some years ago, an obsession with Polish poetry led me to two ideas: First, that I should visit Poland, and second, that someone else should pay for it. So I wrangled a Fulbright fellowship and spent a year traveling in Poland. (I mention the Fulbright not to brag, but because it bugs me when travel…
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Great Debate Between ‘Among’ and ‘Between’
Rabbi Jonathan H. Gerard of Easton, Pa., gently corrects me for writing in my column of February 14, after listing various English newspaper translations of a Hebrew phrase used by Israeli Minister of Commerce Naftali Bennett, “Not that there’s an enormous difference between any of these.” Rabbi Gerard comments, “Of course, you meant ‘among.’” Did…
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