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
Ben Schrank and Joshua Furst Debate Judaism and Art
Ben Schrank and author and frequent Forward contributor Joshua Furst met up at The Brooklyn Inn with the intention of drinking some beer and discussing fiction, Brooklyn and their complicated relationships with Jewishness. Schrank recently published his wise, big-hearted new novel, “Love Is a Canoe.” Since much of the story revolves around publishing and the…
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Books Author Blog: Obsession in Blue
Baruch and Judy Sterman’s “The Rarest Blue: The Remarkable Story of an Ancient Color Lost to History and Rediscovered” is now available. Their 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 admit it,…
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What Has He Done To Deserve This?
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked By James Lasdun Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $25 A small boy flees across a bridge. Assassins follow, begging for a taste of his blood to eat with dessert: “to top off the honey.” Eventually, the boy surrenders his head, submitting to his beheaders’ crazed illogic:…
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‘Yip’ Harburg’s All-American Lyrics Came With a Heaping Helping of Yiddishkeit
Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist By Harriet Hyman Alonso Wesleyan Univeristy Press, 332 pages, $28.95 The tragic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” the idealistic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the raucous “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” were all co-written by the same American Jewish lyricist, E. Y. Harburg (1896–1981), and all owe…
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Books American Jewry’s Top 100 List
M. M. Silver is a modern Jewish history scholar at Max Stern College of Emek Yezreel in Israel. His newest book, “Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America: A Biography,” is now available. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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How James Lasdun Found Himself Victimized by Anti-Semitic Cyber-Stalker
Victims of stalking are typically counseled to ignore their tormentors. Just as trying to banish an unwanted thought invariably lodges that thought in the mind, asking a stalker to stop often yields the counter effect — a fresh round of emails, phone calls, visits or letters. To the stalker, the contact is proof that her…
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Prisoner X and the Letter of Mystery
By now, unless you’re the type that refuses to follow the news (not that I blame you, but in that case, why are you reading this newspaper?), you know who “Prisoner X” is. Called “Mr. X” by the Israeli news service Ynet, which originally broke the story of his suicide in a high-security Israeli prison…
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Bertrand Russell Challenges Nikita Khrushchev on Anti-Semitism
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 Years Ago 1913 As the Yiddish theater strike on Manhattan’s Lower East Side…
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Rabbi Rules Water Is Non-Kosher
More stories here… Federal regulations that safeguard the hydration of citizens have fallen afoul of the church state divide when, citing concerns about water-borne micro-organisms in potable water supplies, Rabbi Detrop of the Orthodox Onion declared water nonkosher. “We have been able to make limited supplies of OO koshered water available at $5 a bottle,”…
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God Shifts to Pay-Per-Miracle Service
The Backward is the Forward’s annual satirical Purim edition. Enjoy! More stories here… Taking a cue from on-demand digital streaming services like Hulu and Spotify, God announced today that He would no longer be everywhere all the time, and would focus on a pay-per-miracle model for distributing His compassion. “In today’s crowded religious landscape, it…
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Books Author Blog: Places Never Seen
Earlier this week, Jay Neugeboren wrote about the title story of his third collection and the art of silence. His 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: My most recently published novel, “The…
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Opinion Mamdani has made ample efforts for Jews. How come no one is telling that story?
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News Nearly half of young U.S. Jews want to replace Israel with binational state, poll finds
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Film & TV Woody Allen’s biggest fans were easy marks for a fake monologue about antisemitism
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Music For Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, an 85-minute playlist
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani missed the Israel Day Parade. Many who went didn’t miss him.
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Fast Forward NY Democratic stalwarts show support for Israel even as Mamdani skips parade
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Fast Forward For the first time, a kosher restaurant has won a Michelin star
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Fast Forward London police are ‘reviewing’ video of Helen Mirren being called ‘an evil Zionist’