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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On Patrick Stewart’s 80th birthday, his secret Jewish history
Actor Patrick Stewart, who turns 80 on Monday, July 13, 2020, isn’t Jewish. But that didn’t stop him from assuming — incorrectly — for well over half his life that a mohel, or someone with a very sharp implement, had removed his foreskin shortly after birth. On a TV talk show in 2017, Stewart revealed…
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WATCH NOW: August 31: The new way to raise money for the causes you love
WATCH HERE. Philanthropist Lisa Greer, author of the just-released “Philanthropy Revolution: How to inspire donors, build relationships, and make a difference” (Harper Collins) joins Forward National Editor Rob Eshman and Andres Spokoiny, President and CEO of Jewish Funders Network, for a conversation on a better way to raise money for the causes you believe in….
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Dylan’s latest really is his best since ‘Blood on the Tracks’
“The best Bob Dylan album since “Blood on the Tracks” — that mythical peak has been both something of a holy grail for Dylan obsessives and a lazy way for critics to overpraise the current Dylan effort they were supposed to be appraising. In many ways, Dylan fans have been more discerning than critics, far…
The Latest
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Dylan’s best since ‘Blood on the Tracks?’ You’re asking the wrong question
To me ranking albums, paintings, buildings, poems, or anything else in art — including baseball teams, players and moments — makes no sense. I could care less what anybody, myself included, thinks are the best ten Rolling Stones songs, the three essential Emily Dickinson poems, or if “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “I Married a Communist,” “Sabbath’s Theater,” or “The…
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In my life, there were two Bob Dylans — my father’s and mine
The sounds of a big house in the south of Mexico City. A house full of books, albums, paintings, sculptures and dust. This was the place of my dad, a place filled with music, ideas and wonders. My Dominican mother decided to move here after living in D.R, U.S.A and the late USSR; and by…
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In a hellish landscape of Huey Lewis and Liza Minnelli, a new Dylan album thankfully arrived
It was September 1989, and I’d just been hired as a clerk at See Hear, a small record store in Chicago. I’d spent the summer in a melancholic haze of post-college graduation wastreldom, smoking cheap weed and drinking cheaper beer (where have you gone, Carling Black Label?), and spending countless hours in communion with my…
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Why no Dylan album will ever surpass ‘Stormy Season’
When I got the text from a friend of mine, asking if I’d heard Bob Dylan’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” I hadn’t yet had a chance to listen to it all the way through. “Honestly, the music isn’t much,” my friend wrote. “But the lyrics are amazing.” She quoted a stanza from “Key West,” her…
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Dylan painted his masterpiece — the next year he painted another one
It’s as predictable as death and taxes. Bob Dylan releases a new album and critics hyperventilate that it is his best since his masterful 1975 album, “Blood on the Tracks.” The latter was an acoustic song cycle largely about the dissolution of a marriage (his marriage?), and it does indeed stand the test of time…
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The best Dylan comeback album featured no Dylan songs at all
Bob Dylan always liked stories about people who get up and go somewhere, and then come back. They are constructs about change; in the end, the subject comes back — and is a different person. For a young man thirsting to grow, you can see the appeal. Indeed, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” one of…
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‘Will men keep explaining Dylan to me into eternity?’
To be a Bob Dylan fan has too often meant occupying 'a world of men.'
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Life, death, heartbreak, disillusionment — Dylan’s first album as an old man
Bob Dylan’s Grammy-award-winning comeback album, 1997’s “Time Out of Mind,” is a glorious record of death and rebirth. Death insofar as the album’s songs frequently have themes of mortality and aging (“I been all around the world, boys / Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door”)(“It’s not dark yet, but…
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