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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Muslims Who Helped Save French Jews
Benjamin Stora, an Algerian-born writer and political activist who turned 61 in December, has for years combined history and self-history as a North African Jew. Most recently he has become embroiled in a controversy about the role that Muslims may have played in saving French Jews during the Holocaust. As adviser for the acclaimed French…
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Books Today I Am Woman
Shulamit Reinharz and Barbara Vinick are the editors of the recently published “Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah around the World.” Their blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series,…
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Female Flash Mob Takes on Beit Shemesh
Who can blame the women of Beit Shemesh for wanting to cut loose? Times have been tough: They’ve been in crisis mode since the opening of school and ultra-Orthodox extremists began harassing the girls at the Orot Banot school. Not to mention the ongoing issues of increased gender segregation on buses, separate sidewalks in parts…
The Latest
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Books If Anne Frank Lived Upstate
Hope: A Tragedy By Shalom Auslander Riverhead Books, 304 pages, $26.95 As sophisticated, politically unpredictable and stylistically diverse as our community of Jewish writers is, it can seem as if the best of them, when they reach for Jewish content, still take down the Holocaust from the shelf. This generalization holds true across generations: grandees,…
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Sholom Aleichem Is Alive and Well
Yarmulkes are a rare sight along Norwood’s Bainbridge Avenue, a busy thoroughfare at the heart of the Bronx neighborhood once dominated by Jews and Italians. Today, the street is lined with shops and stores owned by a new, diverse group of immigrants. Residents can get their teeth cleaned by a Dominican dentist, purchase pastries from…
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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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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…
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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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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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