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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Israeli Films at Venice Festival Depict Wide Divide Between Jews and Arabs
In Amos Gitai’s film “Ana Arabia”, premiered in Venice this week, a Palestinian whose late wife was an Auschwitz survivor and Muslim convert treks to Arab cities to find a dentist instead of one five minutes away in Tel Aviv. In “Bethlehem”, the work of an Israeli director and Palestinian screenwriter, an Israeli Shin Bet…
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9 Top Hard Rock Anthems For Rosh Hashanah
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is upon is. It’s a time to reflect and repent, to eat symbolic foods, to shake the sins from our soul and celebrate our special relationship with God, so that we may be signed and sealed in the Book of Life for a good and sweet New Year. It’s…
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At 92, Mike Greenstein Is Still One of the World’s Strongest Jews
Seated on the balcony of his apartment in the Far Rockaway section of Queens with a spectacular view of the Atlantic Ocean, Mike Greenstein, 92, is matter-of-fact about his Superman powers. Just recently, he participated in this year’s Olde Time Coney Island Strongman Spectacular, pulling a truck with a chain clenched between his teeth. “It’s…
The Latest
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How SeaWorld’s Treatment of Killer Whales Violates Jewish Law
If you’re looking for a good cry but are tired of Adele and don’t have the time for “Les Misérables,” try watching the first 20 minutes of “Blackfish,” the new documentary by Gabriela Cowperwaith, originally in theaters and set to air on CNN in October. You’ll hear the story of the 1983 capture of Tilikum,…
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Can You Name Your Kid ‘Messiah’?
You may have read about Lu Ann Ballew, the Tennessee judge who recently changed a 7-month-old baby’s name, Messiah, to Martin. Her ruling was based not on compassion for the poor infant, but on the opinion that “the word Messiah is a title and it is a title that has only been earned by one…
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Books Fall Brings a Rich Harvest of Books
A bounty of Jewish and Israeli-themed books awaits readers this fall, with choices ranging from the gently nostalgic to the deeply disturbing. In both fiction and nonfiction, the past is very much present. Much of the fiction draws heavily on history (“A Guide for the Perplexed,” “Dissident Gardens,” “The Lion Seeker”) or autobiography (“Between Friends”)….
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France Has Problems With All Religions — Not Just Islam
A couple of months ago, the French media reported on yet another clash between religious extremists and state authorities. Fifty boys from a private religious school near Paris arrived at a public lycée to take their final examination; however, when two women serving as their proctors met them, there was a standoff. The students, citing…
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Books Booker-Nominated Novel Raises Jewish Themes
Laura and Marina are strangers. Their home in London is an island with a foreign culture, a cramped flat in Bayswater in which they are themselves outsiders. Their keepers — Laura’s mother-in-law, Marina’s grandmother, and her two sisters — are Hungarian, and speak with a heavily-accented English. Dar-link, they say. Von-darefool. Tair-ible. They host parties…
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Did Jews Win the Second World War?
● How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism By Benjamin Ginsberg Rowman & Littlefield, 234 pages, $35 Benjamin Ginsberg’s intriguing new book, “How the Jews Defeated Hitler,” offers a provocative new answer to an old question. In seeking to explain why the Jews failed to resist…
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The Dark Comic Arts of Daniel Clowes
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibit “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” (on view through October 13) ought to come with a parental advisory about its explicit content. Although the cover of one of the comic books that hangs in the show — “Eightball” No. 8 (1992) — is recommended “for mature readers,”…
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Books How Lizzie Skurnick Went From Young Adult Authority to Publisher
Writer and book critic Lizzie Skurnick has spent years poring over the young adult classics of her youth. She’s scoured eBay for them, studied them like a talmudic scholar, praised them in (hilarious) writing. And now, at long last, she’s putting the books back out in the world for the rest of us to enjoy….
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