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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Why It’s So Hard for Naftali Bennett to Say I’m Sorry
Did he or apologize or didn’t he? The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that he did. Israel’s minister of the economy, Naftali Bennett, on the other hand, declared that he had not apologized at all, but had simply issued “a clarification” when telling an audience at a conference January 29: “If the prime…
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How Jews Gave Real Estate a Good Name
In the two cities I call home, New York and D.C., real estate is the stuff of enduring conversation. Discussing who lives where and in what kind of habitat — condo, co-op, private home or rental apartment — never seems to grow stale. Nearly as compelling a topic, or so it seems to me, is…
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Anne Frank House Marbles Show Rolls In Big Crowds
(JTA) — When the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam unveiled its widely publicized offsite display of its namesake’s marble collection this week, it was yet another example of this small museum having a big impact with tiny objects. Despite its narrow scope and limited exhibition material — in a city where visitors can choose from…
The Latest
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Being Jewish in Germany — Or Not
Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany By Yascha Mounk *Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages, $26 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, postwar Germany’s leading literary critic, who died last year at the age of 93, once described himself as “half Polish, half German and wholly Jewish.” Reich-Ranicki later denied that claim, insisting instead…
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Zach Braff’s New Movie, ‘Wish I Was Here,’ Plays on Actor’s Jewish Upbringing
Day school parents can take heart from Mr. Scrubs. “Wish I Was Here,” Zach Braff’s Kickstarter-funded film, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in late January. Fans — especially the 46,520 who helped pay for it to be made — were eagerly awaiting the “Garden State” follow up. And, exactly a decade after Braff’s first…
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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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