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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Send Iraqi Jewish Archive Back Where It Belongs
At the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, 24 items from the Iraqi Jewish Archive have just gone on display. I attended the February 3 opening of the exhibit, entitled “Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage.” It included a 16th century Hebrew Bible, a hand-lettered Passover Haggadah from 1902, and a 1967 school…
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Public Accusation Against Woody Allen Has Ugly Whiff of a Lynch Mob
In the weeks since Mia Farrow took to Twitter to voice her disdain for the lifetime achievement award Woody Allen was given at this year’s Golden Globes, everyone and his sister has flooded the Internet with an opinion about Allen, Farrow’s daughter Dylan and what may or may not have transpired between them twenty-two years…
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Perplexed By Maimonides? Here’s Guide for You.
Maimonides: Life and Thought By Moshe Halbertal Princeton University Press, 400 pages, $35 About 800 years before the Pew study, Moses Maimonides received a worried letter from the leader of the Jewish community of Yemen asking him how to combat the specter of assimilation. Yemenite Jews had recently been afflicted by persecution and by a…
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Conductor of Israel National Opera Guilty of Nazi Collaboration
1913 •100 years ago Rebecca Edelman Steals a Hat Thirty-year-old Rebecca Edelman, a resident of the new Jewish town of Boro Park, in Brooklyn, was in Manhattan and needed to take a Third Avenue tram. As she entered the car, she went to throw a dime into the change box. She missed, and the dime…
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What’s More American Than Bob Dylan — and Super Bowl Car Ad?
“Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” people who don’t know much about Bob Dylan have said, in response to his surprising, patriotic Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler. To them, Dylan is still someone he never was: a Sixties icon, a protest singer who would never sell out. “Sad, sad, sad,” moaned one of my Facebook…
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Meet Harry Ettlinger, the Real-Life Jewish ‘Monuments Man’
There is hardly a white spot visible on Harry Ettlinger’s calendar. As we tour the 88-year-old Ettlinger’s immaculate apartment, he ignores the ringing phone; someone from Sony Pictures leaves a voicemail: “I will be emailing you today or tomorrow your confirmation number for your limousine pickup.” He pulls press clippings and pictures out of folders,…
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Maximilian Schell, Actor Who Played Jews, Nazis — and Both
Considering that the Oscar-winning Austrian-Swiss actor Maximilian Schell, who died on February 1 at age 83, spent WWII safely in neutral Switzerland, it is remarkable that he spent his acting life portraying Nazis, victims of Nazis, and defenders of Nazis, far beyond the requirements of typecasting. Schell’s 1961 best actor Academy Award was for his…
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How Real ‘Monuments Men’ Saved Priceless YIVO Yiddish Treasure
George Clooney may never have worked in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a Jewish academic organization dedicated to studying and preserving the culture of east European Jewry, but his new film, Monuments Men, portrays a group of soldiers who was very much responsible for saving and securing a significant portion of…
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Stories Herald Arrival of a Great ‘UnAmerican’ Author
The UnAmericans By Molly Antopol W.W. Norton & Company, 272 pages, $24.95 Molly Antopol’s debut collection of stories, “The UnAmericans,” covers the gamut of 20th century immigrant experience. The settings range from Israel to Ukraine, from California to the Upper West Side. They take place last week and in the middle of the last century….
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Secret Message on a Bottle in Jerusalem’s City of David
A skilled paleographer or specialist in ancient writing can sometimes guess what a mere fragment of that writing is about. A month ago, Haifa University biblical historian Gershon Galil published such a guess in an Israeli journal. If he’s right, not only has he correctly deciphered a puzzling inscription written in the ancient Phoenician/Hebrew alphabet,…
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All The Print That’s Fit To Print
Recently, the Jerusalem Print Workshop — long the first port of call for those working in the medium of print — celebrated its 40th anniversary. For Israeli artists, the only first-rate alternative to the workshop is the [Gottesman Etching Center,][2] which opened its doors in 1993. Now, at the suggestion of Israeli artist Asaf Ben…
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