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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A Jew by Choice: Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011
Whereas Judaism, unlike some other religions, discourages conversions, there has always been a certain amount of giddy excitement when a star, from Marilyn Monroe to Sammy Davis Jr., converts to the Jewish faith. Few, if any, such conversions, however, made the lasting impact of the ceremony at Hollywood’s Temple Israel on March 27, 1959, at…
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April 1, 2011
100 Years Ago in The Forward Yiddish theater actor Joseph Shoengold, son of famed Odessa actor Abba Shoengold, and son-in-law of famed director Joseph P. Adler is out on $2,000 bail after being accused of fathering an out-of-wedlock child with Sarah Kaufman, a Vaudeville chorus girl. These revelations are considered shocking, because Shoengold married Adler’s…
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Chosen Again, To Go Onstage
‘The Chosen” is back in Washington, D.C., but this time with two Aarons presented in the round. In this new production by Theater J, director Aaron Posner refigures his 1999 co-adaptation of “The Chosen,” Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel exploring the enduring friendship of two boys from different Jewish worlds in 1940s Brooklyn. And it stars,…
The Latest
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Conducting Crowds to the Beat of His Grandparents
Michael Tilson Thomas’s grandmom had trunks in her basement. A lot of our grandmothers had stuff stacked away. But our grandmoms were not Bessie Thomashefsky. “When I used to go visit my grandmother at her apartment in Hollywood, she had trunks in her basement and that was a special treat,” said Tilson Thomas, music director…
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Not for the Sake of Heaven
Passover is coming, and with it, the season of questions. We Jews have long prided ourselves on asking good questions — even more than on providing adequate answers. We prize debates that go on forever. And, of course, we answer questions with still more questions. Inquiry, discourse, communication: These are some of the core values…
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A Geek by Any Other Name Would Smell
Israel went to the polls March 15, not to elect a new Knesset or prime minister, but to choose the winners of the popular reality show “Ha-Yafa v’ha-Khnun.” Named after the American TV program “Beauty and the Geek,” “Ha-Yafa v’ha-Khnun” was also modeled on it and has been, in terms of ratings, one of the…
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Celebrating the Remarkable Life and Work of Ronit Elkabetz
From its inception, the mission of the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival was to bring the breadth and variety of Sephardic culture, history, customs and experience to American audiences through film. The crown jewel of this year’s 15th iteration is Sephardic Jewry’s film princess, the inimitable Ronit Elkabetz. Marrying the artistry of Meryl Streep…
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Books Choosing ‘The Chosen,’ on Stage and Screen
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree There aren’t too many novels that can lay claim to a second, much less a third, lease on life as both a film and a play, especially when the subject at hand has to do with religion and faith. But “The Chosen,” Chaim Potok’s novel of Orthodox Jewish life…
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Books A Girl Who Slays Dragons, but Stops for Shabbat
Mirka Hershberg is a normal 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl. She attends school, polishes the candlesticks for Shabbat, does her homework, gives tzedakah, fights trolls and dreams of slaying dragons. Well, maybe not your typical 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl. Written by illustrator Barry Deutsch, “Hereville” is the story of Mirka’s quest for a dragon-slaying sword. Originally…
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From Zero to 4,678 in 80 Short Years
Part One of Two In 1924 there was just one Israeli folk dance, “Hora Agadati,” created in Tel Aviv. Within a year of gaining statehood, Israel could boast 75 folk dances. And by 2005 there were 4,678, according to Dina Roginsky, an anthropologist and lecturer at Yale University who has studied the growth of Israeli…
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Books Esther vs. Vashti, Austen vs. Brontës
As I prepared for the beginning of the perennial Purim question of “Esther vs. Vashti” at the same time as I delved into Jane Eyre-mania, I began to think about how women are always pushed into dichotomies. I wondered cynically how soon someone would write about the new Brontë films by declaring Jane Austen passé….
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In Case You Missed It
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Culture An organ divided a synagogue. The fallout helped create Reform Judaism.
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Yiddish אַ קאָנפֿרענענץ אין וואַרשע גיט זיך אָפּ מיט ייִדישע שפּראַכןA conference in Warsaw focuses on Jewish languages
פֿערצן פֿון די 27 רעפֿעראַטן האָבן באַהאַנדלט די ייִדיש־שפּראַכיקע קולטור.
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Books In David Baerwald’s epic tale of espionage and wartime horrors, family history is stranger than fiction
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Fast Forward Bamba blankets NYC after Park Slope Food Coop vote to boycott Israeli products. What’s next?