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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Finally, the rarest Jewish texts from Italy will be available online
Italy has been home to Jewish communities for over two millennia, and it has been an important location for writers and scholars — as well as a major center for manuscript production and printing. That has meant a huge number of Hebrew books with tremendous historical value. For scholars, though, some of those books have…
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What to read before you stream the ‘Hamilton’ movie
On Independence Day Eve, almost anyone can get a front row seat to “Hamilton.” It’s truly an American dream. The filmed performance of the cultural juggernaut about the inaugural secretary of the Treasury will arrive on the Disney+ streaming service July 3, a year before its intended theatrical release. To celebrate the occasion of this…
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Do we really need Dustin Hoffman starring in ‘Our Town?’
When Broadway finally reopens, it will be in the aftermath of a revolution. A global health pandemic and a national revolt against racism should advance efforts that theatermakers of color have been pushing for for years: inclusion and diversity in casting and production and stories that reflect their lives. The reckoning hasn’t yet reached Grover’s…
The Latest
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I speak for the tribe who followed Carl Reiner
When I was growing up on Long Island, our house had a living room with orange-fabric couches (it was the 70s after all) and an upright piano flanked by two dark brown wood cabinets. On one side was a bar where my dad would have a Gin & Tonic (with a Stella D’oro breadstick) every…
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Milton Glaser loved New York — and was its greatest observer
If you’ve ever lived in New York City — or set foot in it, or talked to someone about it, or watched one of the approximately three billion films about it — you know it has a complicated relationship with its past. On the one hand, there’s a sort of maniacal drive to the future…
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Mel Brooks in ‘deep shock’ after losing Carl Reiner, says son Max Brooks
Mel Brooks was there when his longtime friend Carl Reiner passed away in the middle of the night on June 29. According to Brooks’ son, Max, the director doesn’t yet know how he’s managing the loss. “My dad’s friendship with Carl goes back 70 years,” Max Brooks said during a June 30 webinar for Moment…
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Why comedy was the perfect career for a Bronx-bred Jewish boy like Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner, who died on June 28 at age 98, was that most unusual of performers, a funny straight man. A collaborative artist of uncommon skill, he is perhaps most celebrated for having created and written the 1960s sitcom “The Dick van Dyke Show,” originally intended for himself to star in. Dismissing rumors that producers…
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12 clips to remember Carl Reiner by
Carl Reiner had good reason to disdain bananas. Though he had a 70-year career in film and television, he was regularly referred to in his early appearances as Sid Caesar’s “second banana.” When he sat down with Mel Brooks’ 2,000-year-old man, one critic noted that he had risen to the level of “second-banana supreme.” Yet…
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Why we shouldn’t be quoting H.L. Mencken
It was simultaneously surprising and ironic to read a quote from the notoriously anti-Semitic H.L. Mencken in your July 28 article about anti-Semitism. Mencken infamously wrote the following in his 1930 “Treatise on the Gods,” one of his best known books: “The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever…
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Carl Reiner, ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ creator and Mel Brooks’ other half, dies at 98
Carl Reiner, the Mark Twain Prize-winning writer, actor and director whose sharp and open-hearted voice shaped over 50 years of comedy, has died at 98. According to his son the filmmaker Rob Reiner, he passed away on the evening of June 29. Reiner, best known for creating and acting in “The Dick Van Dyke Show,”…
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Why Carl Reiner was the dreamiest boss I ever had
“My secretaries stay a long time,” Carl Reiner said as he greeted me at the start of the job interview, “so I don’t know what I’m supposed to ask.” Okay, I was plotzing to get the job. Though at 26 I’d worked in show business long enough to know that celebrities were often nothing like…
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