Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Organs of Laughter and Bile
When Ian McEwan was quoted in a recent profile as saying that “most novels are boring,” he was responding to those who had pigeonholed his books as merely highbrow thrillers, and asserting the fundamental aspiration of all good books, literary or not: that they be interesting. As regards novels, McEwan’s judgment was spot-on. Most of…
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Calling the Faithful To Witness
‘I am a Christian,” President Obama declared in his June 4 address in Cairo, “but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan (sic) at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.” Although…
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June 19, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward The headless body that was cut up in pieces, wrapped up in oil cloth and found near the public school on Henry Street caused much upset and fear among residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Sliced into pieces, wrapped in two bundles of oil cloth and marked with the…
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Film & TV Sexy, Single British Jews Say Hello to JDate UK
This blog breaks two golden rules of mine: first not promoting adverts and second not enjoying anything Jewish that includes the line “Oy Vey!” But, I’ll go with the minhag of my friend’s dad for whom all women are Jewish beyond a certain level of beauty. In this case, all videos are kosher beyond a…
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Anything You Can Do
In jazz terminology, it’s known as “call and response”: The trumpet section plays a few notes, which are answered immediately by the saxophones. Or, a soloist will give out with a four-bar phrase and then hear it echoed back at him by the full ensemble. Call and response is as essential to big band swing…
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Out of This Life
As a young man, the Coney Island-reared Donald Margulies worked a day job as a graphic artist for years, while writing plays on the side. His big break came in 1991 with “Sight Unseen,” a play about a successful and, perhaps morally compromised, artist. Other notable plays by Margulies include “The Loman Family Picnic” (1993)…
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How Jews Harshed the Hilarity
In “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905), Sigmund Freud observes that a strict superego — or the conscience that punishes misbehavior — results in a correspondingly aggressive jest. As we all have found, whether at school or in the workplace, the harshest superego suppresses laughs entirely. In practical comedic terms, jokes get meaner…
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Triple Threat
Despite her successful career as a singer, actor, comedian and author, Rain Pryor is most frequently identified as the daughter of the famously outspoken African-American comedian Richard Pryor and Jewish dancer Shirley Bonus. But Pryor’s parentage and upbringing have given her a wealth of her own material. She has explored that material in her one-woman…
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Podcast: Mind and Body Poet
An image is everything. It is what poet, essayist, and all around lauded writer, Katha Pollitt first draws on when crafting her poems. She has a new collection of poetry, “The Mind-Body Problem,” out this month. Pollitt may be a long time columnist for The Nation, but her new poems are hardly political. Instead, her…
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Film & TV Surreal Mosaic Family
A mark of the strangeness of the film “In a Dream” is that the dramatic revelation of Isaiah Zagar’s sexual abuse as a child is almost immediately forgotten in our journey through the roiling psychic storm that is his mind. For make no mistake, although this follows a family (filmed from the inside by his…
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June 12, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward Yankev Gordin is dead. Endless numbers of people have received the news with a sharp pain and with tears in their eyes. But for us, for the radicals, his death is especially painful. Gordin, with his literary activity, belonged to our radical circle. He was one of the best-known,…
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