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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Steinhardt Attacks Jewish Leaders
In a surprise move, even noted by the non-Jewish business press, Michael Steinhardt attacked Jewish communal organizations and their complacent leadership. A longtime stalwart of Jewish philanthropy, he accused organizations of disliking change and being satisfied, at least in the case of campus Hillels, with “trying hard” but not being “good enough.” Too many Jewish…
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Canonizing Saint Simon?
Neil Simon is, it turns out, in line to be one of the greats. The Broadway revival of his Jewish family play, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” was supposed to be offered in repertory with the second of its two sequels, “Broadway Bound.” David Cromer — whose recent productions of “Our Town” and the avant-garde musical, “The…
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Jennifer Kronovet’s "Awayward" is Way Inward
Reading Jennifer Kronovet’s recent collection “Awayward,” you may think she’s translating from another language, transposing foreign syntactical structures, turns of phrase, rhythms, tonalities — a whole unfamiliar psyche — into English. Kronovet’s speculative original is forever inaccessible, and can only be known through her translation. “Known”, though, would be to overestimate its accessibility because, while…
The Latest
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Ignaz Friedman: Great Jewish Pianist
The Polish Jewish pianist Ignaz Friedman may not be a household name, but his majestic artistry, honored by a brilliantly researched new biography by Allan Evans, “Ignaz Friedman: Romantic Master Pianist,” just published by Indiana University Press, makes him of urgent interest to anyone who loves piano music. A Naxos CD reissue series, establishes Friedman…
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Finian’s Rainbow
The welcome Broadway revival of Burton Lane (born Burton Levy in 1912) and E. Y. Harburg’s 1947 musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” opening October 29 at the St. James Theatre offers a fresh opportunity to relish its wish-fulfillment overturning of racism and economic inequalities in the mythical American state of Missitucky, when the “Idle Poor Become the…
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I Sing the Body Eclectic
The LABALMA Body Project, a multimedia art exhibit running at New York’s 14th Street Y until November 17, explores ideas of physicality in a genuine, contemplative and engaging way. While its works occasionally verge on the overly literal, the project as a whole is, thankfully, a far cry from simple navel-gazing. A collaboration between LABA…
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Eating Animals Are Wrong
Eating Animals By Jonathan Safran Foer Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $25.99. As a novelist, Jonathan Safran Foer writes with a certain whimsy about violence. In “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” fictional treatments of the Holocaust and the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks contain humor and lyricism to…
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Dance by Dance
Deborah Colker is as animated in life as she is on the stage. A director and choreographer with a more than 30-year career, Colker grew up in Brazil to Russian immigrant parents who gave her the Jewish education that she says allowed her to pursue dance and create art. Colker was the first woman to…
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Religion Is Actually Spirituality
Religion vs. spirituality. We hear the opposition all the time. “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual,” increasing numbers of Americans say every year. Conversely, many Jews insist that they follow Halacha, Jewish law, not out of any subjective spiritual motive, but because it is commanded by God. I, too, have often claimed that spiritual practice is…
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Toward a Jewish Architecture?
Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue By Susan G. Solomon Brandeis University Press, 236 pages, $45. Long regarded as one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, Louis Kahn has become the focus of renewed popular attention. The Oscar-nominated documentary film “My Architect” (directed by his son,…
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When in Rome (Don’t Call Yourself Roman)
From down under in Melbourne, Australia, Lauren Wiener writes: “Could you please explain how ‘Nusach Sfard’ came to be the Nusach of some Ashkenazi Jews and why the family name Ashkenazi exists mostly among Sephardic Jews?” Let’s take part two of the question first. Although on first thought it may seem illogical that Sephardic Jews…
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