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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When the Family Doctor Turns Out To Be Josef Mengele
“The German Doctor,” a film that Argentinian filmmaker Lucia Puenzo adapted from her novel “Wakolda,” begins with a chance meeting: A mysterious, good-looking doctor and a teenager at a service station. Soon, the doctor is asking for directions, following her family through winding Patagonia roads to a beautiful vacation spot. While the doctor is based…
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Film & TV Penka Kouneva Wants to Blast Hollywood’s Celluloid Ceiling
Courtesy Penka Kouneva // From left to right, Jeremy Borum, Penka Kouneva and Nathan Furst working on the Dreamworks feature “Need for Speed” At six, Penka Kouneva was playing piano in her hometown of Sofia, Bulgaria. At 12, she was composing music for children’s theater. At 17, a song of hers won a Japanese competition…
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The Secret Jewish History of William Shakespeare
Had William Shakespeare never died, he would be turning 450 years old this month, which would put him in biblical territory for longevity. As it turns out, that’s not necessarily such an unusual place for him to be. While little is known about the historical Shakespeare, there is much to suggest in his work and…
The Latest
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Music Birthright Eases ‘Jewish’ Definition as Applications for Free Israel Trip Dip
(Haaretz) — Concerned about declining interest in its free 10-day trips to Israel, Taglit-Birthright has hired a marketing agency to seek out new participants, targeting college students with little or no connection to the Jewish community. According to figures obtained by Haaretz, registration among North American Jews for Birthright’s summer trips dropped by more than…
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Music Spoon-Bending Psychic Uri Geller Is Face of Israeli ‘Be Prepared’ Campaign
Celebrity psychic Uri Geller is the beaming new face of Israeli disaster-readiness, starring in army-sponsored TV and Internet advertisements on how to take shelter from missile attacks or earthquakes. Launched on Wednesday, the campaign marks Geller’s return to his native country from Britain and aims to keep Israelis vigilant, though public fears of any imminent…
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Reb Zalman’s December Song
● The December Project By Sara Davidson HarperCollins Publishers, 208 pages, $25.99 Founded in the aftermath of the Sabbatean heresy, early Hasidism was a paragon of paradox. Its early 19th-century adherents, particularly those of the philosophically rigorous movement Chabad, were uniters of opposites — heaven and earth, being and nothingness, concealment and revelation. The greatest…
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Chasing Dr. Aribert Heim, the ‘Butcher of Mauthausen’
● The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim By Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet Doubleday, 250 pages, $27.95 In “The Eternal Nazi,” journalists Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet tell the gripping story of the decades-long pursuit of Nazi doctor Aribert Heim and, in the process, offer a…
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Israel’s Protest Queen Daphni Leef Isn’t Prime Minister — Yet
In summer of 2011, Daphni Leef’s apartment lease expired but she failed to find a new, affordable rental. Forced to leave her abode, Daphni pitched a tent on the luxurious Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, igniting a social protest that eventually saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking over streets all over the land, pitching…
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Books What Gabriel Garcia Marquez Taught Me
It is a well-known fact that young men under 18 embrace literature primarily to impress the girls they are trying to seduce. You had to congratulate my ambition: A Soviet-Jewish immigrant kid with funny hair and funnier clothes after an American-born, Catholic, Colombian beauty whom I’ll call C. But I had a secret weapon: the…
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One For the (Vinyl) Record Books
When Eilon Paz came to Brooklyn in 2008, he was looking for more work as a freelance photographer. Though he’d established himself in his native Israel shooting travel and food features, the move was hardly easy — he arrived at the height of the recession. “I came here with nothing. I had no job. I…
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John Turturro’s Hasidic Rom-Com
A romantic comedy is a fantasy about love. It’s a fantasy of finding love, of love overcoming the odds, of love doing away with any other difficulty that life might present. At the end of the movie, when the guy and the girl decide they can’t exist without each other, we know they’re going to…
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