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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The Jewish Inventor of the Bra
(Haaretz) — January 9, 1886, is the birthdate of Ida Cohen Rosenthal, the co-founder of Maidenform, today the world’s largest manufacturer of “shapewear.” She was born Ida Kaganovich (she anglicized her maiden name to “Cohen” after coming to the United States) in the town of Rakaw, in what is today Belarus. Her father, Abraham Kaganovich, was…
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Plans for Soviet Jewish Autonomous Region a Failure
1913 •100 years ago Jewish Gangsters Held for Murder “Dopey Benny” Fein, Waxey Gordon, “Little Abie” Beckerman and Reuven Kaplan were the four gangsters arrested on charges of killing an innocent bystander, Frederick Strauss, near Arlington Hall on St. Mark’s Place, in Manhattan’s East Village. The gangsters are being held and their lawyers have demanded…
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Books Gary Shteyngart Insults Canadian Authors
There’s never been any kind of publicity author Gary Shteyngart hasn’t liked, but it seems the same cannot be said about Canadian fiction. The Russian-American writer, currently making the rounds on a book tour for his new memoir, “Little Failure,” managed to dis the oeuvre of writers north of the border while being interviewed by…
The Latest
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End of Loehmann’s Is End of an Era
The news that Loehmann’s, the grandmother of discount clothing emporia, is closing its doors caught me by surprise and saddened me, too. It shouldn’t have. After all, apart from the occasional purchase of a pair of socks, I hadn’t shopped there in years, nor did any of my fashion-minded confrères. A casualty of online shopping,…
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The Problem With ‘Girls’ Is Men
I am not a girl, but “Girls” is about me. Like the characters on the HBO show — which begins its third season January 12 — I am in my 20s, white, middle class and live in Brooklyn. I work in a creative field, have friends who are actors and baristas, and sometimes, to my…
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Books Rolling Stone Writer Pens Lou Reed Biography
The life and times of the late rocker Lou Reed will be detailed in a biography that will be penned by Rolling Stone magazine writer Will Hermes, publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux said on Wednesday. Reed, the frontman of the 1960s influential band The Velvet Underground, died of liver disease last October at the age…
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Is the World Gonna End in 2014?
This may seem odd, but a surprisingly large chunk of the Western World believed we wouldn’t get to see 2013, purely because that’s what the Mayans thought. Most of these people never did anything else that Mayans did — never ate human flesh, for example, or at least never offered to pay for it. So…
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Why Gary Shteyngart Remains His Own Best Creation
Little Failure By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 368 pages, $27 It was perhaps inevitable that Gary Shteyngart would one day write a memoir. Like other authors who traffic in fiction that is thinly-veiled autobiography — or, as in Shtyengart’s case, that appears as shadow puppet projections of his own Russian Jewish immigrant story — the…
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The Secret Jewish History of Cher
In the beginning, there was Cher. And the Lord saw that Cher was good, and so He made Madonna. And Britney. And Gaga. And Miley. And then, exhausted, spent, and depressed about twerking, He went back to the drawing board and breathed new life into Cher… again. We’re on the verge of yet another Cher…
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How Jewish Museums Are Expanding Into the Digital Universe
Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts released some preliminary findings from its 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. The survey found that more than two-thirds of American adults accessed art via electronic media, including handheld mobile devices and the Internet. This information came as no surprise to the most widely known…
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A Good Season To Live High on the ‘Khoge’
Just in time for the last week of December, Beth Kissileff has a query about the Yiddish word khoge, which denotes a non-Jewish holiday. Does it, she asks, refer only to a religious holiday like Christmas, or does it also include “civic holidays” like Thanksgiving and New Year’s? Since civic holidays did not exist in…
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