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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How Hanukkah Entered American Mainstream
● Hanukkah in America: A History By Dianne Ashton NYU Press, 368 pages, $29.95 Hanukkah, I learned while attending a liberal Hebrew school in the 1970s, became an important Jewish holiday only in order to compete with Christmas. My teachers and, I imagine, many others said this with a mixture of sneer and pity: It…
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When George Washington Celebrated Thanksgivukkah
If you’re one of the 9 million American adults who in any way identifies as Jewish (according to the recent Pew survey this includes anyone who has laughed at an episode of “Seinfeld” or sent back a meal at a restaurant), then you’ve undoubtedly heard of the Halley’s comet of holidays, the Y2K of yuletides:…
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Will the Real Sholem Aleichem Please Stand Up?
The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye By Jeremy Dauber Schocken, 464 pages, $28.95 Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ By Alisa Solomon Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32.00 Like most Jews of my generation, I saw “Fiddler on the Roof” before…
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How an Affront to Judaism Came To Memorialize Israel’s War Dead
Charles Krauthamer writes from Teaneck, N.J.: “While reading a spy novel set in Salonika, I came across the word andarta as a term for Greek highlanders who fought as guerrillas against the Turks [in Greece’s early-19th-century War of Independence]. And while in Israel, I saw many monuments commemorating fallen soldiers, each called an andarta, too….
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Imagining Life of Dona Gracia, Portuguese Jew and Richest Woman in World
(Haaretz) — About 10 years ago, while visiting the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris, Israeli journalist Naomi Keren noticed an ancient silver medallion that bore the likeness of Dona Gracia Nasi. “I was taken aback,” Keren says. “What I saw contradicted everything I knew about the use of art in connection with…
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Celebrating 200 Years of French-Jewish Composer Charles Valentin-Alkan
This month marks the bicentenary of the French Jewish composer and pianist Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888). A new biography was published earlier this year in France, written by two devotees, Brigitte François-Sappey and François Luguenot. And pianists such as Pascal Amoyel and Alessandro Deljavan, have released recordings of his work, which range from the resolutely virtuosic…
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Israeli Government Declares a Mourning Period After Kennedy Assassination
1913 •100 years ago Fight on the Lower East Side Pushcart peddler David Levine was wounded during a gunfight that took place on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A witness told reporters that two young men were fighting with a group of people when one of the group members pulled out a revolver and started shooting….
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How ‘Stars of David’ Made Leap From Page to Stage
I’m hesitant to admit that I believe in the concept of bashert, the notion that something was inevitable or orchestrated. But I also think it’s no accident that I’ve landed at this entirely unexpected juncture, where my childhood obsession with theater has joined my adult profession as a writer and fueled the Jewish exploration that…
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It’s Not Easy Being a Jewish Artist in a Muslim Land
Venturing into global conflict zones, some of which are Muslim, can be challenging to Jewish theater artists. Consider this: Two artists were willing to speak with the Forward about their experiences, while eight others who had traveled — or were about to travel —into Muslim hotspots did not want to participate in this story or…
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How a Schlumpy Kid Named Art Spiegelman Changed Pop Culture
Like a handful of other artists and thinkers of the past 50 years — Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg come to mind — Art Spiegelman has transformed the medium in which he works so radically, and influenced the artists following in his shadow so completely, that society itself has been altered….
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Masada Stubbornly Gives Up Its Secrets — Lice and All — After 50 Years
(Haaretz) — It looks like an ordinary lice comb, with wider teeth on one side for untangling knots and finer teeth on the other for removing nits. Except that this one happens to be made of wood, rather than metal. And it also happens to be about 2,000 years old. Holding the recently unearthed artifact…
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Film & TV A new documentary challenges stereotypes about Orthodox Jewish women — and their wigs
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Yiddish World New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America