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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How Many Circles Has Gehinom?
‘In order to receive a building permit, you have to pass through the seven circles of hell,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared not long ago, in a Hebrew address in which he spoke of the need to streamline bureaucratic procedures that make Israeli life difficult. The Hebrew idiom “to pass through the seven circles of…
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‘Alas, Poor Andrzej’: The Strange Case of Tchaikowsky’s Skull
The admission by London’s Royal Shakespeare Company that, despite previous disavowals, a production of “Hamlet” featured not only Dr Who actor David Tennant, but also a real human skull onstage — as Hamlet’s deceased friend the jester Yorick — brings the donor of that skull back into the limelight. The Polish-Jewish pianist Andrzej Czajkowski (who…
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Yiddish King Lear on the Relief Roll
of director Joseph Seiden. The play was better received than the film.” photo-credit=”Image by COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR JEWISH FILM ” src=”https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/675x/center/images/cropped/kinglear-article2-1208-1425721454.jpg”] The United States government bankrolled some of the most innovative Yiddish stage productions in the 20th century when it paid the salaries of actors, writers and directors under the auspices of…
The Latest
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The Workmen’s Circle Goes Beyond the Pale
If, when you think of Toronto, you think of white people living by a lake, siding with the redcoats and dodging the draft, you are way out of date. Yes their money has the queen’s head on it, but twenty first century Toronto has a thriving multiethnic cultural scene to go with their excellent healthcare,…
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Constitution as Talmud
The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide By Seth Lipsky Basic Books, 352 pages, $25.95 Seth Lipsky says that while he was writing his new book about the U.S. Constitution, one of his children suggested he design it like the Talmud, with text in the middle and commentary all around. The book he did write, “The…
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The Man Who Shaped 20,000 Penises
Philip Sherman has a good claim to have handled more foreskins than any man alive. And possibly more Jewish foreskins than anyone in history. He’s a Mohel who markets himself as a dependable cutter rather than someone who is going to make each bris memorable. Based in Manhattan, but prepared to hop from borough to…
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Israel’s Naked Truth
Documentary film is a sprawling, big tent of a genre. Any topic could, conceivably, be made into a documentary. But I’ll venture a semi-controversial opinion: It shouldn’t. What do I mean by that? Well, not everything is best said within the visual, dynamic medium of film. A good, if not great, documentary will intrigue and…
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Transports of Jazz
A moment of auspicious transatlantic coincidence: while the Jewish Museum Berlin features an exhibit of jazz photography by two Jewish photographers, Francis Wolff and Jimmy Katz, New York’s Lincoln Center is showing “In the Best Possible Light: Herman Leonard’s Jazz,” featuring the work of another Jewish photographer who covered the same era, and shot many…
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Finding a Way Back to the Land of Granada
In 1992, 500 years after the country expelled them, Spain formally welcomed back the Jews. This is the premise for the new play “Granada,” produced by Polybe + Seats, which ran through November 22 at the Access Theater in New York. Playwright Avi Glickstein, whose family comes from Eastern Europe and whose father is a…
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The Maestro Business
Ever since conductors’ salaries began to resemble those of industry CEOs, it was only a matter of time before the worlds of music and business intertwined more incestuously. Printed reports inform us that the New York Philharmonic’s departing music director, Lorin Maazel, earned $2.8 million from that orchestra alone in 2006, and James Levine possibly…
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Spinoza vs. Maimonides, For the Future of Judaism
Maimonides, Spinoza and Us: Toward an Intellectually Vibrant Judaism By Rabbi Marc D. Angel Jewish Lights Publishing, 224 pages, $24.99. What does a 12th-century rabbi in Egypt, arguably the greatest thinker in Jewish history, have in common with a 17th-century Jewish philosopher in Amsterdam who was “expelled from the people of Israel” for “abominable heresies…
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