Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
Talya ZaxOpinion Editor
By Talya Zax
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Film & TV Leonard Bernstein To Be Portrayed By Jake Gyllenhaal In New Biopic
The year of Leonard Bernstein’s centenary, already widely celebrated, just got even better: Jake Gyllenhaal, your Serious Jewish Actor crush, is going to play Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic. As Deadline reports, Gyllenhaal will produce and star in “The American,” which will begin filming this coming fall from a screenplay by Michael Mitnick, adapted from…
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Culture ‘Mean Girls,’ ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ‘Angels In America’ Lead Tony Nominations
After a particularly boring season on Broadway, there are few surprises among this season’s nominees for the Tony Awards. “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Mean Girls” predictably mopped up nominations, scoring 12 apiece in a season in which new musicals were scarce. Equally predictably, “Escape to Margaritaville,” the Jimmy Buffet musical, won no Tony love; somewhat more…
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Books Sami Rohr Prize Finalists Include Ilana Kurshan, Yair Mintzker
The finalists for the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, announced today, are Ilana Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink,” Sara Yael Hirschhorn’s “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement,” Shari Rabin’s “Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Yair Mintzker’s “The Many Deaths of Jew…
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The Schmooze ‘Disobedience’, Jake Tapper’s First Novel And More To Read, Watch And Do This Weekend
It finally feels like spring in New York, which is a mercy. Everyone looks beautiful, the city is enchanting, the parks beckon and one can almost forget that the news is very, very strange. Let forgetfulness linger this weekend, and indulge in one of our top picks for new books, movies and cultural events in…
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Culture First Step To An All-Yiddish ‘Fiddler On The Roof’? Dance Auditions.
During the cherry-blossomed blush of the first proper week of spring, on the same day Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced which musicians would accompany 2018’s most hotly-anticipated nuptials, a group of men across the pond from Kensington Palace rehearsed for another famous wedding. “Hot toe! Hot toe! And heel,” choreographer Staš Kmieć yelled at…
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Theater Are We Ready To Reckon With ‘The Merchant Of Venice’?
In May 1943, at Vienna’s Burg theater, the Nazi party staged its most famous production of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” It starred Werner Krauss, a man so anti-Semitic that he is said to have asked Joseph Goebbels to make a public announcement clarifying that he was not Jewish, but rather habitually played Jewish caricatures…
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The Schmooze Celebrating Cynthia Ozick, ‘Kodachrome’ And More To Read, Watch And Do This Weekend
It’s Earth Day this weekend, and while it may not feel like springtime yet, do your best to get out and volunteer in your community. To reward yourself for your volunteering efforts, check out some of the weekend’s best culture to boot. 1) Read Cynthia Ozick, a grand dame of American letters, turned 90 this…
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Culture Swastika Gets You In Free To This German Theater For Hitler Play. Really?
Here’s a tip: If anyone currently in hot water with a minority group tells you the last thing they want to do is offend that group, they probably have not devoted much thought to what sorts of things that group might find offensive. In 2018 alone, a California Polytechnic State University fraternity released a statement,…
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Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
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Fast Forward Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
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Opinion This German word explains Trump’s authoritarian impulses — and Hitler’s rise to power
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Music ‘No matter what, I will always be a Jew.’ Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history
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Culture Katz’s Deli is a mecca for food influencers — it kills me to see them butcher its good name
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Film & TV Whoever said ‘you can’t take it with you’ never reckoned with this Jewish patriarch
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Fast Forward Students at Netanyahu’s Pennsylvania high school want him ejected from the alumni hall of fame
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Culture On the border between hipster and Hasidic, a Brooklyn barbershop specializes in Orthodox haircuts
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