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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Please Touch the Art
Hours before her troupe’s first public performance, in 2002, Adina Tal faced a quandary unlike any posed to other directors: How would her cast members know that the audience was applauding? The scenario was not uncommon for the director of the theater group Nalaga’at (“Do Touch”), who, since forming the group in late 1999, has…
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To Get to Carnegie, Practice Your Yiddish
Putting a new spin on the old saw, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Moishe Rosenfeld, producer of the June 3 Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre Gala concert starring Neil Sedaka, told the 3,000-strong audience: “Practice, practice your Yiddish!” And so mameloshn bounced off that venerable hall’s acoustically famed walls with the Klezmatics launching the evening…
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In Defense Of His Amorality
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s admirers describe him as a man of impossible paleness, “translucent” skin laced with veins the same shade of blue as his bulging eyes. They say he was small. In photographs, his right eyebrow arches and his thread-thin upper lip sneers. His ears are large and nearly pointed, elegant despite their size, and…
The Latest
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Deconstructing Bashevis
Addicts, everyone knows, are difficult to satisfy: They don’t want more of the same, but they are ready to test limits, to be exigent in their rewards. Since the first moment I encountered the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer — in Spanish translations in the 1970s — I have been a confessed addict. He struck…
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What Is a Jewish Father?
This Father’s Day will be my second, and I’m feeling a bit conflicted. Last year was wonderful. My son was just four months old, and I shone with that new-parent glow. Strangers were approaching me in the street and cooing over him, and my friends were treating me with a new respect. Father’s Day felt…
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Billy Crystal Gets Serious About His Newest Role
Billy Crystal, the award-winning actor, director and comedian, has gotten serious about something: the recent birth of his first grandchild, Ella. Crystal is the latest in a line of celebrities to pen a children’s picture book. But unlike, say, Madonna, Crystal was inspired not by his own children, but by the generation after that, and…
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From the Silence of a Prison Cell in Uruguay
‘Silence is the real crime against humanity,” states Mauricio Rosencof in his wrenching autobiographical novel, “The Letters That Never Came.” He ought to know: Rosencof, who was accused of being a subversive and attempting against Uruguayan sovereignty, spent 13 years in prison before regaining his freedom in 1985, with the return of the democracy to…
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An Intrepid Crowd Honors Patriots
This year’s May 27 Intrepid Foundation Fleet Week Gala aboard the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum was as poignant as it was patriotic. At our table, the father, mother, wife and daughter of an American soldier who, a week before, lost his life in Iraq. They were one of three families of fallen soldiers acknowledged that night….
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Re-creating Hungary A Glimpse Into a Style of Cooking That Has All But Disappeared
You can have your celebrity chef cookbooks, the coffee-table-sized volumes with the luxurious four-color photographs printed on pages so glossy that they seem almost to melt in your fingers. These may be the big sellers, but I for one am far more interested in the cookbooks that authentically present the traditional cuisine of a culture…
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Sage for the Ages
Over the past decade, Rachael Sage has become a veritable Renaissance woman, claiming singer-songwriter, record company founder, voice-over artist, pianist and ballet dancer among her many artistic accomplishments. From a child dancing pas de deux in such productions as “The Nutcracker” with The School of American Ballet to earning a degree in Drama from Stanford…
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June 18, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • Elderly Jewish millionaire Meyer Guggenheim one of the major players of the uptown crowd of “Yahudim,” has been slapped with a lawsuit for breach of promise, which demands damages of $100,000. One Hannah MacNamara, who says that she and Guggenheim lived a clandestine existence as man and wife under the name…
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