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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Books
Author Blog: Putting Myself on the Line
Peri Devaney’s new book, “A Jewish Professor’s Political Punditry: Fifty-Plus Years of Published Commentary by Ron Rubin” (Syracuse University Press), is now available. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: As a…
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Allan Sherman Was Once Bigger Than the Beatles
● Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman By Mark Cohen Brandeis University Press, 320 pages, $29.95 I loved visiting my maternal grandparents in the Elmhurst section of Queens. Although they lived in a modest, two-bedroom apartment on a side street tucked between Broadway and Roosevelt avenues, the place seemed exotic, as I…
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Books Naftali Herts Kon’s Works Wrenched Out of Poland’s Clutches
On both occasions that the KGB arrested the Yiddish writer and poet Naftali Herts Kon, it burned his writings. When Kon escaped from the Soviet Union to Poland in 1959, he thought everything would be different — but it wasn’t. When the Polish Communists arrested Kon in 1960, they simply confiscated his writings and refused…
The Latest
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A Coup Is a Coup — Even If We Like Outcome
When is a military coup not a military coup? Whenever, so it would seem, an administration in Washington wants to say it’s something else. Although, as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank observes, “call[ing] the overthrow [of the Egyptian government] a ham sandwich won’t make it any less of a coup,” Washington has preferred to refer…
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Books Yiddish Theater and Birth Control
Earlier this week, Melissa R. Klapper wrote about abortion and the complexity of halacha and five American Jewish women you’ve (probably) never heard of. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: At…
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Onward and Upward with Matisyahu in Krakow
In the sultry darkness of a summer night, a tall, skinny figure with close-cropped hair and a purple T-shirt threaded through a beer garden during Krakow’s Jewish Culture Festival, the annual nine-day extravaganza of performance, exhibition, debate and intensive interaction that for a quarter of a century now has been a catalyst of Krakow’s Jewish…
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Books From Intermarried Couple to Observant Jewish Family
Earlier this week, Gayle Redlingshafer Berman wrote about mourning the loss of a non-Jewish parent. Today we hear from Gayle’s co-author, her husband Harold Berman, the former Executive Director of the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts. Gayle and Harold are the co-authors of “Doublelife: One Family, Two Faiths and a Journey of Hope.” Their blog…
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Israeli Graphic Novelist Rutu Modan Draws On Her Family’s Secret History
In Israel — a country almost entirely bereft of homegrown graphic novels — Rutu Modan is a one-woman industry. Her new book, “The Property,” published in both Hebrew and English, follows Mica, a young Israeli woman on a trip to Warsaw with her grandmother Regina, ostensibly to track down and reclaim the property owned by…
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Books Abortion, Birth Control, and Halacha
Earlier this week, Melissa R. Klapper wrote about five American Jewish women you’ve (probably) never heard of. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: I recently came across a copy of the…
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The Next Generation of ‘the Seltzer Man’
If you believe what you read in the news, the seltzer man is on the brink of extinction. Every few years, some publication will run a wistful feature on the remaining stock of old-timers, dedicated men who still ride around New York making door-to-door deliveries of carbonated water, their crates of glass siphon bottles clanging…
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Books Mourning the Loss of a Non-Jewish Parent
Gayle Redlingshafer Berman is co-author, with her husband, Harold, of “Doublelife: One Family, Two Faiths and a Journey of Hope,” the first true-life account of “an intermarriage gone Jewish.” She is also an internationally acclaimed singer, and has performed and conducted throughout North America, Europe and the Middle East. Her blog posts are featured on…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
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Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
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