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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The Secret Jewish History of The Who
Editor’s Note: Pete Townshend turns 75 today. In honor of that occasion, we look back at his band’s secret Jewish history, which we first explored in 2015. If The Who’s visionary songwriter and guitarist Pete Townshend had had his way, “Tommy” — an allegory about a traumatized messiah — would not have been the band’s…
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How a Pomeranian named Kiss is helping me through quarantine
Kiss is a three-pound, four-legged Pomeranian. She is an AKC-emotional support dog who has joined me at hospitals and in collaborations with organizations like ELEM/Youth in Distress in Israel, a nonprofit and a special consultant to the UN which provides life-altering support and services to at-risk Israeli youth. Kiss is the Hebrew word for pocket…
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Philip Roth’s ‘terrible gift of intimacy’
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth By Benjamin Taylor Penguin Books, 171 pages, $26 Their relationship developed at a slow burn. Benjamin Taylor and Philip Roth met in 1994, at a mutual friend’s birthday party. Four years later, after reading “I Married a Communist,” Taylor wrote a letter, and Roth responded with a…
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In ‘Mrs. America,’ only well-mannered women make history
Phyllis Schlafly is doing sit-ups. It’s the second episode of FX’s “Mrs. America,” and the anti-feminist crusader, portrayed by Cate Blanchett, is prostrate in her oak-panelled Illinois manse, getting her reps in while the television advertises diet Fresca. “When I put on a red pantsuit and my husband doesn’t notice, that’s bad,” a model croons….
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When Fred Willard spoke to (and for) the Jews
Fred Willard, the actor and improviser whose characters embodied blithe obliviousness, was not Jewish. The performer, rather, was at his best when he played the sort of un-self-aware putz that Jewish humor desperately needs — a sunny and thick-headed foil to the neurotic or arch sensibilities that Jews so often made their own. From his…
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Rush Limbaugh says Philip Roth is the favorite author of the ‘uber left wing’
On May 14, listeners to Rush Limbaugh’s radio program were treated to a primer on “left-wing” literature and a lesson on a more clinical term for farts. We have Philip Roth to thank. The teachable moment was prompted by a “Fresh Air” review of Benjamin Taylor’s memoir, “Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth,”…
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Philip Roth doesn’t live here anymore: A writer, a stonemason, an American friendship
Editor’s Note: This essay, originally published by the Forward on May 17, 2020, won this year’s Deadline Club award for arts reporting. Philip Roth and Russ Murdock trudged through the woods behind Roth’s Litchfield, Conn., home, looking for Roth’s tombstone. It was summer, 2008 or 2009. The crickets were singing. The estate, a 200-year-old former…
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Freedom means doing the right thing
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Ezra Cutler, an 11-year-old student from the Jewish Community Day School in Boston. You can find more work from our young writers here. Freedom to me is something that all people should have….
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How I found freedom through dialogue
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Emily Bernstein Dunkel, a 17-year-old student at the Fieldston School in New York, NY. You can find more work from our young writers here It was June 26th, 2019 when I left my…
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Will ‘Scarface’ return to its Jewish roots?
Brothers Joel and Ethan Coen are polishing the script to a reboot of “Scarface” for director Luca Guadignino. The sentence reads like a screen trade Mad Libs, but it is true nonetheless. The partnership seems like an odd one. But it’s actually a pretty good match. The Coens, after all, directed “Miller’s Crossing” and, having…
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‘All my socks are face masks now’ – Life in the new abnormal
“Are you going out at all?” friends called to ask, each of us struggling to interpret self-distancing during the latter part of March. “Old-people shopping hour is my new happy hour,” I quipped, adding, “I’m glad I never had my eyes done. Even with my mask, they know to let me in.” Those of us…
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