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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In Zelenskyy’s Mordechai-like Purim plea, Biden is as uneasy as Esther
Centuries ago, in a story we tell each year on this night, a plea was made to someone with access to power, but who faced no small risk. “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace,” Mordechai, a Jew living in Persia told…
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Five costumes for this year’s combination Purim and St. Patrick’s Day
At various points in history, Jewish and Irish immigrants filled the tenements of New York City. Both were poor, foreign groups looked down upon by the rest of America. We’ve come a long way from those days, but Jewish and Irish people still share something important — the tradition of getting wasted once a year…
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In a delightful new Purim film, Esther is a secret agent in Argentina
In its long history, the Purim story has had its fair share of reboots. Because, in every generation, a new Haman arrives to oppress us, that genocidal adviser has worn the face of Hitler and, when Stalin suffered a stroke on Purim, averting his own dire plans for Jews, he wore a different mustache entirely….
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Negotiating between heroism and collaboration, a kindergarten teacher sought to save lives in the Holocaust
The Nazis Knew My Name By Magda Hellinger with Maya Lee and David Brewster Atria Books, 320 pages, $27 In his 1986 essay collection, “The Drowned and the Saved,” Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Primo Levi famously discussed a “grey zone” of moral “ambiguity and compromise” during the Holocaust. Among its inhabitants, he suggested, were concentration camp prisoners…
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Barry Manilow on dueling cantors, Levy’s Rye and his musical’s New York debut
Barry Manilow never meant to become a pop star, and his Grammy, Emmy and Tony-winning career as a songwriter is a source of perennial tsuris for his lyric-writing partner Bruce Sussman. If you ask them, “Mandy” came, gave and (forget what you heard) did some taking. That breakout hit diverted the pair’s original ambition: writing…
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The secret Jewish history of Carson McCullers
About one-third of the way through Suzanne Vega’s terrific new one-woman film, “Lover, Beloved,” about the life of great 20th-century American writer Carson McCullers, the folk-pop singer-songwriter – playing McCullers in a tour de force of acting (and singing) – says, as McCullers, “I wanted to write about a Jew. You see, because, we are…
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What would Otto Frank tell Anne about Charlottesville? A new play tells us.
Roger Guenveur Smith had been meaning to play Anne Frank’s father for some time – but first he had to embody someone quite different. “I was finally ready to really dive into the archives, and lo and behold, we lost Rodney King,” said Smith, who performed a one-man show as King, the Black victim of…
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Every Jewish thing you need to know about Batman (and there’s a lot of it)
“The Batman,” starring Robert Pattinson, is the 11th live-action film for the Caped Crusader. He’ll also return later this year in “The Flash,” where both Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck reprise their roles as alternate dimension versions of the character. Batman is the property of DC Comics and parent company Warner Bros. He’s one of…
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Once exceptional, the lives of American Jews have become lachrymose
“The Tears of History: From Kishinev to Pittsburgh,” by the renowned French historian Pierre Birnbaum, takes its title from the work of the influential Jewish-American historian Salo Baron. In rejecting what he called the “lachrymose” account of Jewish history, Baron instead insisted that, both in medieval Europe and modern America, our history was more fortunate…
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How a radio pioneer named Steve Post set the stage for Howard Stern and Marc Maron
The best part of “Playing in the FM Band,” a new documentary about revolutionary radio personality Steve Post, finds our hero trapped in the bathroom of WNYC. “In the instant before my flesh made contact with the seat, I realized that I was clutching a cold, metal object in my right hand,” Post says in…
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The story of a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor needs no contemporary parallels to be relevant
“I Am Here,” Jordy Sank’s 72-minute documentary, is at once a memorial to the millions who died in the Holocaust and an impassioned response to Holocaust deniers. But at its core it’s a celebration of Ella Blumenthal on the occasion of her 98th birthday. Now 100, Blumenthal is one of the oldest living survivors to…
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