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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How Blake Bailey embodied Philip Roth’s spirit — and betrayed his legacy
When I spoke last month with Blake Bailey, the disgraced author of Philip Roth’s biography, I asked one question that seemed to shock him. It wasn’t the one about what he had to say to critics who suggested his biography of Roth was marred by deep misogyny. Bailey — whose book has been permanently pulled…
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After Kristallnacht, a hunger artist confronts a splintering world
The Passenger By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz; translated by Philip Boehm; preface by André Aciman Henry Holt and Company/Metropolitan Books, 266 pages, $24.99 A feverish urgency infuses Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s rediscovered novel about a frantic German Jewish businessman after Kristallnacht, an internal refugee whose doomed travels both echoed and prefigured the author’s own. Boschwitz’s Jewish father…
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The youngest Yiddish ‘Fiddler’ cast member on making a new tradition
Samantha Hahn was the youngest member of the critically-acclaimed National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene production of “Fiddler on the Roof” (she played Tevye’s youngest, Beylke). She’s also an author. In advance of a NYTF book party and discussion May 2, we are excerpting from her book “On the Roof: A Look Inside Fiddler on the Roof…
The Latest
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Books Norton pulls Philip Roth biography from print after author accused of sexual assault
The publisher W.W. Norton has pulled its recently-released biography of Philip Roth from print after multiple women accused its author, Blake Bailey, of sexual assault. The Associated Press reported that Norton would stop printing of “Philip Roth: The Biography,” a much hyped, 912-page treatise on the author’s life, as well as Bailey’s 2014 memoir “The…
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In gentrified Greenwich Village, one link remains to a Jewish folk past
In 2017, Amanda Foley, the location scout for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” needed a place to shoot a record store scene. It’s a challenge to find interiors that fit the storyline of the series’ main character Midge Maisel, a wealthy Jewish housewife who dives into the Village scene of the late 50s and early 60s….
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James Carville tells Democrats to ‘start speaking Yiddish’
James Carville thinks Yiddish should be the language of voter outreach. Well, kind of. In an interview with Vox, the longtime political consultant and “Muppets” cast member expressed his concern about “jargon-y language” surrounding subjects like race, suggesting a more accessible form of messaging for Democrats. “I always tell people that we’ve got to stop…
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Is Netflix’s newest Israeli import too American to succeed in America?
Aside from the Hebrew, “Blackspace,” the Israeli thriller just acquired by Netflix for international distribution, feels like it’s set in America. It takes place in a blandly unidentifiable high school building. The kids are all secular, dressed in crop tops and shorts — not a kippah to be seen. And, most American of all, the…
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A fond farewell to Bob Fass, rabbi of a radical radio congregation
I’ve been a member of two unconventional congregations in New York. One was in the East Village and was financed by several lawyers in the Bronx. Hardly anyone paid dues but our Hasidic rabbi still fed his gaggle of converts, Baal Tshuvahs and crusty Lower East Side geezers, including a Jew known as Murphy who…
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The secret Jewish history of cicadas
Do you hear that? What’s that buzzing noise? If you live between Tennessee and New York — especially if you live in Ohio, Maryland, or the Virginias — and if it’s mid-to-late May or June, chances are good that what you’re hearing are cicadas. Specifically, male representatives of “Brood X,” or “the Great Eastern Brood,”…
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The 2021 Oscars had Borscht Belt resort vibes
If you’re like me, you were hoping there was an envelope mixup. We’d seen it before at far more polished ceremonies. The 2021 Oscars, which broke with tradition by announcing Best Actor as the final award on Sunday, seemed designed from tip-to-tail to honor the memory of Chadwick Boseman. And then he lost to Anthony…
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This traditionally trained scribe is bending the rules — literally
Kalman Delmoor is a classically trained Hebrew scribe, or sofer, who sits in the Yochanan Ben Zakai historic synagogue, one of the Four Sephardi Synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem. But he doesn’t spend his days writing tefillin or mezuzot. Instead, he turns passages from Torah or liturgy into artwork — some colorful, some…
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