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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Music
Romney Ad Vows Better Ties With Israel
Let’s be honest: based on past experience, the chances that Mitt Romney would move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem if he were president, or that he would even continue calling Jerusalem the capital of Israel, are slim. Yes, President Reagan did not bother to visit Israel, and President George Bush only did…
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‘Jew-Washing’ Is Bad Practice and Phrase
In the July 24 issue of the New York Jewish Week, you’ll find an article by Yitzhak Santis and Gerald M. Steinberg that begins: “At the Pittsburgh General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) earlier this month, a motion to adopt a boycott of three companies for doing business with Israel was hotly debated and…
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Was George Orwell an Anti-Semite?
“One way of feeling infallible is not to keep a diary,” wrote George Orwell in December 1943. The man considered by many to be the English language’s most influential political essayist of the 20th century never tired of questioning himself and was indeed a prolific diarist. Next month, his diaries will be published in the…
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When Mom and Pop Owned the Shop
Food, glorious food is what virtually everyone I know talks about incessantly. What we ate, where we ate it and who made it constitutes a hefty chunk of our daily conversational fare. But were it not for the urban grocery store, that all-but-vanished institution, we wouldn’t be singing the praises of mozzarella, olive oil and…
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Gore Vidal and the Jew He Loved
Even before the novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright Gore Vidal, who died on July 31, is buried in Washington, D.C’s Rock Creek Cemetery alongside his life companion Howard Austen, bloggers have hastily called Vidal an anti-Semite. The reality is more complex. Vidal will be remembered not for his political views, but his historical novels such…
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His Cross To Bear
It’s tempting to read literal crucifixion imagery into Barnett Newman’s 14-canvas series, “The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani.” The portrait-oriented, black-and-white paintings and their bold stripes initially appear to be fully vertical in their thrusts, like crosses without horizontal shafts. But upon closer inspection, the vertical stripes, or “zips,” as Newman called them, which…
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Books A Catalan Jew’s Concise Wisdom
“Tell a blind man his house is on fire and he will reply, ‘I wish I could see that!’” “I don’t like having white hair but I like even less when it falls out. Isn’t it sad to worry about the loss of something one dislikes?” “My son, I prefer to see you hunting lions…
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Looking Back: August 10, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward Has anybody seen Abie Levitt’s wife? The Levitts moved with their son to Portland, Ore., from New York a few years ago. Not long after, Rosie Levitt started making noises about how the family should move back to New York. Abie didn’t want to go back — he was…
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The Woman Who Can Help Hyatt’s Housekeepers
Ever since the Dominique Strauss-Khan scandal, the treatment of hotel workers and their very physical vulnerability has been eating away at my conscience. I savor an occasional hotel or B&B stay — there’s nothing like physical separation from the stack of bills, the computer, the “to-do” lists. But pleasures aren’t as pleasurable when you realize…
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Books Quebecois Chronicler of Continent’s First Jews
A French-language tome by a hard-line Quebec separatist doesn’t seem like a typical candidate for a Canadian Jewish Book Award. But in June, Denis Vaugeois’s “Les Premiers Juifs d’Amérique” won the 2012 prize for history, crowning what the Montreal Gazette called the historian’s ”55-year quest” to rescue the story of Quebec’s pioneering Hart family ”from…
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When the Right Is Right About the Left
Let me start with my bona fides. For several years, and at significant personal cost, I have spoken out about Israeli policies in the West Bank, in particular the settlements and the route of the separation barrier, which I deem to be generally illegal, immoral and harmful to both Israelis and Palestinians. I am also…
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