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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Prime Ribs: Porn, ‘Portlandia’ and Prom
Pornhub.com wants Melissa Rivers to star in an adult film, and the XXX site believes it would be the first-ever adult film to feature “a sexy Jewish American Princess,” TMZ reports. Apparently Pornhub missed Complex.com’s list of the “50 Hottest Jewish Women,” which featured its share of adult actresses. Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, of…
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Fighting Back Against Fundamentalism
How many wake-up calls do we need? The spate of communal misogyny in Israel and the United States, carried out under the pretext of a religious mandate, yet unjustified even by ultra-Orthodox interpretations of Halacha; Haredi America’s wall of silence about sexual abuse; and a variety of other scandals in the Haredi world, such as…
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Jewish Gallery Was Far Ahead of Times
Last month, on December 14, three carefully detailed renderings of synagogue interiors, the handiwork of Marc Chagall, fetched $2.3 million at Sotheby’s. In the days preceding the auction, much was made of the rarity of these works and of how they stood apart from the artist’s oeuvre, which tilted toward the fantastical. A great deal…
The Latest
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Books Life and Afterlife of William Carlos Williams
Something Urgent I Have to Say to You: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams By Herbert Leibowitz Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pages, $40.00 William Carlos Williams was a second-rate poet. Was. These days, of course, he’s a towering figure of American modernism, the heir to Walt Whitman, the godfather of myriad schools…
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How Authentic Is ‘Porgy and Bess’?
George Gershwin was insecure. He never showed it at high-society parties, where he could always be found perched at the nearest piano like a king on his throne. (He played incessantly. Once, when Gershwin wondered aloud if his music would be performed in 100 years, his friend Oscar Levant quipped, “It will be if you’re…
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Books Sex and Scandal in Nazi Berlin
In The Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin By Erik Larson Crown, 464 pages, $26.00 It is just about impossible to find a negative review of Erik Larson’s latest bestselling book, “In the Garden of Beasts,” about American ambassador William Dodd and his family in 1930s Berlin. The worst…
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Looking Back: January 13, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward A fire occurred at New York City’s Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society, a Jewish orphanage on 151st Street and Broadway. More than 700 children live in the orphanage, and they were all on different floors when the fire, which started at a construction site next to the orphanage, broke out….
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New Words Coined To Exclude Women
Hadarat nashim, translatable as “the exclusion of women,” is a Hebrew phrase with which few Israelis would have been familiar several months ago. Now there are even fewer, if any, who are unfamiliar with it. After first coming to the public’s attention late last summer over the issue of excusing Orthodox soldiers in the Israeli…
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The Future of Publishing?
There is no doubt that e-books are a bright spot in the dismal economics of publishing. The current market is strong — according to a recent Harris Interactive poll, one in six Americans now uses an e-reader, and that number will grow as consumers become more comfortable with the technology. Actually, the potential for growth…
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Sorcerer for the Goose and Gander
A reader who may prefer to remain anonymous sends me an email in which he describes recently hearing his sister call his elderly mother a “machashefer,” a term with which he was not familiar. The letter continues: “I asked my sister what she meant by ‘machashefer,’ and she said it’s a witch. She then told…
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Chicago’s Love And Shame
Love and Shame and Love By Peter Orner Little, Brown, 448 pages, $24.99 Part epic, part bildungsroman, Peter Orner’s “Love and Shame and Love” is a refreshing departure from the shtetl nostalgia shtick that has come to typify contemporary American Jewish fiction. Orner’s characters are complex, but their quirks, like their Jewishness, are the stuff…
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