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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Bad Girls: Burlesque Show Puts Jewish Women in the Spotlight
Jewish burlesque seems, in a way, only natural. Sex and humor are inextricably bound in Jewish culture (or at least in certain precincts of it); potty-mouthed, voluptuous women are celebrated. The burlesque tradition took root in the Yiddish theater nearly a century ago when Jewish thespians, not content to be restrained by a single medium,…
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Israeli Plays Open Windows
Late last month, leading theater artists, producers and critics from 23 countries arrived in Tel Aviv for a six-day festival of Israeli plays. Organized by the Institute of Israeli Drama, the IsraDrama Festival brought together these international guests to attend productions, lectures and symposia on Israeli theater and to build future artistic collaborations. “So often…
The Latest
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Hautzig’s Incredible Journey
As the floorboards creak in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the lilting voice of a Jewish émigré glides over the piano and carpets in his home above the city. Walter Hautzig, a world-renowned pianist who was born in Austria, began his 65-plus-year career as a child in Vienna, where his father and grandfather…
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Thinking Green: It’s Not Just a Virtue — It’s Your Jewish Duty
The rhetoric of Jewish environmentalism has long been kind and gentle. Like much of American environmentalist talk, it accentuates the positive: what we can do, how you can help. This is Left-Wing Activism 101: Fight despair, and don’t alienate anyone. And it’s abetted, in both secular and Jewish contexts, by the propensity of tree-hugging liberals…
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Think ‘Fast’
Tantalizingly brief is a note from an e-mailer who identifies himself only as “Brodetzky,” no first name given. It says: “‘Mach gich!’ was my command to a platoon of German soldiers that had ambushed my battalion’s advance to the Rhine River in March 1945. We had outflanked and ambushed the ambushers, but they did not…
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Film & TV Borat, R.I.P.?
Will we be seeing much more of Borat, Sacha Caron Cohen’s uproariously un-P.C. Kazakh journalist character? It seems unlikely, judging from an interview that Baron Cohen gave to The Daily Telegraph. “When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so…
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December 21, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward In response to the storm of protest against Sholem Asch’s play, “God of Vengeance,” both Asch and his mentor, Y.L. Peretz, have sent letters to the Forward. Articles and letters that appeared in the daily newspaper Yidishes Tageblat, arguing that the play is pornographic and depraved, instigated protests. Asch…
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Going Green, McKinney Announces White House Bid
A former member of Congress who has had a famously combative relationship with the Jewish community is jumping into the presidential race. Former Rep. Cynthia McKinney — a former Democrat formerly of Georgia — has announced her intention to run for president with the Green Party. She made her announcement via video: McKinney joins a…
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R.B. Kitaj’s Final Draft
Second Diasporist Manifesto: A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses By R.B. Kitaj Yale University Press, 160 pages, with 41 black-and-white illustrations, $26. Mysticism is what happens when superstition is given a system. But when system and superstition become combined in mystical art — or in writing about such art — the…
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Struggling Yiddish Theater Finds a Home — Onscreen
It was not long ago that the streets of Tel Aviv and New York were packed with the sounds of the Yiddish language and its echo of exile, displacement and fortitude. For Dan Katzir, the Israeli director of the new documentary “Yiddish Theater: A Love Story,” the sounds of this language, and its disappearance, resonate…
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Family Reunion
Light Fell By Evan Fallenberg Soho Press, 229 pages, $22. Three times in the Babylonian Talmud we find the Aramaic expression nafal nehora — “light fell.” This is the light of a powerful physical beauty that behaves almost like matter, seemingly pulled down by gravitational force — a light that may kindle overwhelming desire. Sometimes…
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