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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11 Best Performances by Non-Jewish Actors Playing Jews in the Movies
Observers of the convergence of Jewish and mainstream American culture will be keeping a close watch on this year’s Academy Awards in which — for the first time in movie history as far as the Forward can tell — the two leading contenders for the Best Actor award are non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters. In…
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The Kabbalah of Skiing
It turns out that I’ve underestimated the spiritual importance of chairlifts. Give people a Rorschach test with an Austria-shaped ink stain (a spoon tilted to the right with an oversized bowl and a short handle), and skiing is likely to be among the terms associated with my alpine native country. Every winter holiday while I…
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Menachem Beilis ‘Blood Libel’ Case Gets a New Hearing
● A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel By Edmund Levin Schocken, 362 pages, $28.95 A little more than 100 years ago, an innocent man was about to go on trial. His alleged crime: the murder of a 13-year-old boy two years earlier, found dead of multiple…
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The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote
Was Don Quixote’s impossible dream a Yiddisher one? The French author Dominique Aubier, whose study “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” has just been reprinted, apparently thinks so. Aubier’s book, which originally appeared in 1966, is based on the thesis now generally accepted by literary historians that the author of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes, likely…
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Can the West Bank Also Be Judea and Samaria?
Israeli peace negotiator Tzipi Livni and her Palestinian counterpart, Saeb Erekat, had an emotional exchange the other day at a meeting of the 47th annual Munich Security Conference. It started when Livni used the traditional Jewish terms “Judea” and “Samaria” to refer to the area known to Palestinians and most of the world as “the…
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Everything He Wanted To Know About Sex Among the Orthodox
Racheli Ibenboim is a Haredi lady of the Gur dynasty, one of the most fundamentalist branches in the hasidic world. The Gur people, for one reason or another, are ever busy with ever more rules forbidding more and more “sexual temptations” of whatever kind. For example, not long ago a new prohibition was announced: A…
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‘Kosher’ Chicken Sold on ‘Holy’ Lower East Side Was Really Treyf
1913 •100 years ago Treyf Chicken Sold as Kosher “About strikes you’re willing to write, but about my slaughtered chicken with the treyf neck, you won’t write? What kind of paper are you? Where is your sense of justice?” It was with these words that Brooklyn resident Rokhl Beinisohn berated the editors of the Forverts….
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Music Spain Citizenship for Sephardic Jews ‘Automatic’ — No Discretion
The conferring of Spanish citizenship to Sephardic Jews will be automatic and independent of the government’s discretion, the country’s justice minister told a delegation of American Jews. Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon made the pledge during a speech Thursday before dozens of members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. He was referring…
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Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks Reignite Charges of Anti-Semitism
On this side of the Atlantic, the imminent publication in Germany of Martin Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” (“Schwarzen Hefte”) has caused few if any ripples. For better or worse, the philosopher who theorized about “absence from the world” has been largely absent from our world. Yet in Europe, a surf-like pounding in newspapers and magazines has…
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Oldest Holocaust Survivor Alice Herz-Sommer Aims for Oscar at 110
(JTA) — In her 110 years, Alice Herz-Sommer has been an accomplished concert pianist and teacher, a wife and mother — and a prisoner in Theresienstadt. Now she is the star of an Oscar-nominated documentary showing her indomitable optimism, cheerfulness and vitality despite all the upheavals and horrors she faced in the 20th century. “The…
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Books Modern Love Illuminated
The sea of love can be a “dark and scary place — deep, cold, impenetrable, and populated by billions of freakish creatures lurking in the depths with their gnashing teeth and electrified appendages,” Daniel Jones, editor of the Modern Love essay column in The New York Times, writes in his new book, “Love Illuminated: Exploring…
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
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Sports NBA coach Steve Kerr: ‘Israel sought revenge for Oct. 7 and now 72,000 Palestinians have been killed’
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Film & TV A new documentary challenges stereotypes about Orthodox Jewish women — and their wigs
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News Analysis: As Democrats unite behind Platner, Schumer’s future as leader faces tests
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Fast Forward Pulitzer Prize awarded to Palestinian photographer who captured ‘devastation and starvation in Gaza’
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Fast Forward London police investigating fire at another synagogue, amid string of arsons
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Theater Tony nominee Mark Rosenblatt’s ‘Giant’ journey began with Menachem Begin
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Fast Forward A new Hebrew press in Berlin argues that Israel doesn’t own the language