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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‘Elephant’ Woman Meets ‘Elephant’ Man
Kenneth Sherman’s collection of poems “Words For Elephant Man” was first published in 1983 and has just been rereleased by Porcupine’s Quill. It reads with the richness typical of a painting or a novel — so moving at times that I found myself weeping. It is hard to keep in mind that one is not…
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Of Hobbits and The Golem
Sometimes, a bearded, money-grubbing dwarf is just a bearded, money-grubbing dwarf and not an evil, anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews. Undoubtedly some will view “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” — the first in a trilogy of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book “The Hobbit,” directed by Peter Jackson — and find in Tolkien’s mythical creatures not-so-subtly…
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When To Call a Schmuck a Schmuck
What or who is a Schmuck anyway?
The Latest
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Looking Back: December 28, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Each Friday evening in Manhattan, Nathan Friedman preaches against the “sinful Jews.” Formerly a Jew himself, Friedman is a missionary who invites Jews into his little storefront church and attempts to get them to convert to Christianity. When 17-year-old Paulina Rothberg stood outside Friedman’s church on a recent Friday night, she…
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How David Mamet Abandoned His Art
Posted outside the Golden Theater on 45th Street — where, until recently, David Mamet’s newest play, “The Anarchist,” was running right down the block from his masterpiece, “Glengarry Glen Ross” — is the full text of an opinion piece Mamet wrote for The New York Times in November entitled “Considering the Excesses of Protest.” In…
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Patrizia von Brandenstein’s Designs On David Mamet
For Academy Award-winning designer Patrizia von Brandenstein, the process of designing “The Anarchist” began with a series of exchanges with the drama’s author David Mamet. A visual consultant on the Mamet-scripted film “The Untouchables,” von Brandenstein more recently designed a not-yet-aired HBO biopic about Phil Spector that Mamet wrote and directed. “Mamet and I got…
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Books Forward Fives: 2012 in Fiction
In the annual Forward Fives selection we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in music, performance, exhibitions, books and film. Here we present five of our favorite works of fiction of 2012. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. Jami Attenberg, “The Middlesteins”…
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Books Forward Fives: 2012 in Non-Fiction
In the annual Forward Fives selection we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in music, performance, exhibitions, books and film. Here we present five of our favorite works of non-fiction of 2012. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. Joy Ladin, “Through the…
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Books Forward Fives: 2012 in Poetry
In the annual Forward Fives selection we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in music, performance, exhibitions, books and film. Here we present five of our favorite works of poetry of 2012. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. This year, among the…
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The Other Kindertransport
One hundred and fifty: a number simultaneously enormous and tiny. One hundred and fifty Czech Jewish teenagers left behind everything and everyone — the lives they’d known, their parents, their siblings, their grandparents and aunts and uncles. One hundred and fifty Czech teens, selected by the Jewish Agency’s Youth Aliyah and the Denmark branch of…
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Documenting The Other Kindertransport
In 2009, a group of school children in the Czech town of Velký Beranov was doing research for a project called “Neighbors Who Disappeared” — an effort to get kids to understand all those who are missing from their towns, their cities, their world. Together the kids discovered the strange, melancholy story of Helena Böhmová:…
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