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: Arbitrary Judaism
Earlier this week, Justine Hope Blau wrote about growing up in an intellectual but chronically homeless family. 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: We grew up with my mother’s special brand…
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Filming the ‘Killing’ Fields
The incendiary and critically acclaimed new documentary, “The Act of Killing,” might at first seem to have little connection with the Jewish experience aside from the background of its director Joshua Oppenheimer: Its subjects are veterans of the 1965 massacres in Indonesia, during which 1,000,000 men, women and children were slaughtered over the course of…
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Lower East Side Dad Has Daughter Arrested For Dating Local Gangster Boy
1913 •100 years ago Weinberg Has Daughter Arrested In a courtroom, Herman Weinberg, a 38-year-old resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, accused his own teenage daughter, Flora, of hanging around with unsavory characters, specifically a local gangster who goes by the name “Joe Spanish.” Weinberg, who works at a bookbinding shop with his daughter, tried…
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Music Hitler’s Jewish Neighbor Remembers When
A former Jewish neighbor of Adolf Hitler in Munich has co-authored a book describing his childhood brushes with the dictator. Edgar Feuchtwanger, 88, has joined forces with French journalist Bertil Scali to write “Hitler, mon voisin, souvenirs d’un enfant juif,” or “My Neighbor Hitler: memories of a Jewish child.” The 320-page book is due out…
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Dustin Hoffman’s Directorial Debut
Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut, “Quartet,” is a film set in a British home for retired musicians and singers, starring Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, and the incomparable Maggie Smith. It’s about love and friendship and getting older, and is funny and sad and a total delight. It’s a film that leaves the audience in a good…
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Books Author Blog: Shades of Privilege and Deprivation
Justine Hope Blau, a writer of screenplays and books, has an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her memoir “Scattered: A Mostly True Memoir” 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…
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My Jewish American Girl
I was never a Barbie kind of girl. While my friends collected armies of pink, plastic mannequins — oh, the sequined gowns and magenta workout getups and never-ending ponytails of faux blond locks, not to mention Barbie’s Corvette and three-story dream house, complete with working elevator, garage and pool — I was given educational toys….
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The Rise of American Girl Rebecca Rubin
I am too old to have grown up with American Girl dolls, and my daughter, at 17 months, is too young. But I mentioned the dolls to our 22-year-old nanny, Ellie, a nursing student at the University of Wisconsin who grew up near Milwaukee, and a few weeks later she brought me two heavy shopping…
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The Depardieu Affair
One hundred and fifteen years ago, Cyrano de Bergerac leapt into history. Following the opening performance of Edmond Rostand’s play on December 28, 1897, a dazzled audience obliged the cast to make forty curtain calls. The following night, government officials came to the theater and awarded Rostand with the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. A…
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You Call That Couscous?
On a recent visit to New York, I was handed a menu in a restaurant, on which appeared the entree “Blackened salmon on a bed of Israeli couscous.” “Blackened” I knew; that’s slightly charred in a spicy sauce. But what was “Israeli couscous”? I’d lived in Israel for more than 40 years and never encountered…
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She’s a Believer
Chatting over a light lunch at Joe Allen, a well-known spot for Broadway regulars, the soft-spoken Kirsten Holly Smith bears no resemblance to the brash, swaggering singer Dusty Springfield, Smith’s alter ego in “Forever Dusty,” playing off-Broadway. Smith’s onstage transformation is stunning as she evokes the fierce determination — and underlying vulnerability — of the…
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