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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Imagination as a Group Effort
Among the recurring questions that I and other writers are often asked — along with, “How long did it take you to write the book?” and “Do you use a pencil or a pen?” — there is one that almost always comes up: “Is anyone else in your family a writer?” Those who ask this…
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My Favorite Demon
Writers are famous for their demons, whether they battle alcoholism, depression or the savage pain of a rotten youth. Isaac Bashevis Singer was no exception, except that his demons were demons. Unlike many writers, he made no secret of them: “I am possessed by my demons,” he declared to Commentary. Later, he made a telling…
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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…
The Latest
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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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Golems and Spies: Today’s Two Yiddish Literatures
Today there are two different Yiddish literatures: one secular and one chasidic. Despite the differences in their audiences, they share a language, a cultural-religious heritage and a status of almost complete obscurity to most American Jews. Boris Sandler, by virtue of his position as editor of the Yiddish Forward, has been the gatekeeper for what…
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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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June 11, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • On a secluded farm in New Jersey, well-known Yiddish theater actor Morris Finkel shot and killed his wife, singer Emma Finkel, and then turned the gun on himself. Both Finkels were much beloved, and the entire Yiddish theater community has been deeply saddened by the tragedy. “The news simply took my…
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