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 Stephen Sondheim’s birthday concert, notes of a better, more human Broadway
Streaming live on YouTube, the concert started late, then stopped abruptly, started, stopped, then abruptly disappeared. All in all, the star-studded, highly hyped “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration” finally got rolling an hour and 15 minutes after it was supposed to. In the meantime, would-be viewers anxious to watch Broadway…
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With COVID-19 raging in New York, a klezmer-tinged fanfare for the essential worker
From his rooftop on the Lower East Side, Grammy-winning composer and trumpeter Frank London has been hearing the nightly 7:00 PM calls of gratitude for New York City’s healthcare, food service and transit personnel working through the coronavirus pandemic. Now, he’s enriching the ritual by composing a fanfare for the essential worker for winds, strings…
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From Boccaccio and Edgar Allan Poe, eerie portents of coronavirus
The deadly plague arrived in the noble city of Florence, Italy. It had begun in the East, where it deprived countless beings of their lives before it headed for the West, spreading ever greater misery as it moved relentlessly from place to place. Against it all human wisdom and foresight were useless. Numerous instructions were…
The Latest
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The Joan of Arc of Irish sex — and her Jewish acolytes
In mid-April, The Irish Times alerted its readership to an “astonishing hatchet job” of a national icon, the novelist Edna O’Brien. The offending article, a condescending and nit-picking profile, had appeared some months before in The New Yorker, but took some time for its venom to percolate as far as Europe. O’Brien, who will be…
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Why Jews have always been free
Editor’s Note: The Forward’s Youth Writing Contest is asking middle and high school students to submit essays, short stories and poems on the topic “What It Means To Be Free.” We’re still accepting entries at [email protected] — you can find the entry guidelines here.The deadline is Friday, May 1. Today, we’re proud to publish this…
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“The end is actually the beginning” — and other life lessons from the Zabar’s lox counter
September 1996. It’s unsettling. You’re over 50, you’re Jewish, you walk into Zabar’s expecting that old time Yiddish flavor behind the counter, but all the lox men are Chinese. Well, almost all: a sprinkling of Hispanics, an African American here and there, and yes, an occasional Jew. What was I to do? So, I sold…
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Why I choose to give up freedoms to be free
Editor’s Note: The Forward’s Youth Writing Contest is asking middle and high school students to submit essays, short stories and poems on the topic “What It Means To Be Free.” We’re still accepting entries at [email protected] — you can find the entry guidelines here.The deadline is Friday, May 1. Today, we’re proud to publish this…
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Live in Freedom (An Acrostic Poem)
Editor’s Note: The Forward’s Youth Writing Contest is asking middle and high school students to submit essays, short stories and poems on the topic “What It Means To Be Free.” We’re still accepting entries at [email protected] — you can find the entry guidelines here.The deadline is Friday, May 1. Today, we’re proud to publish this…
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‘The Beastie Boys Story:’ a sad, stilted epilogue from a once outrageous band
The Beastie Boys are feeling their age. In “The Beastie Boys Story,” a taped performance of the band’s non-musical stage show from 2019 available now on Apple TV+, Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) and Michael Diamond (Mike D) — the two surviving members of the legendary hip hop trio — dive into their 30-year history through anecdotes…
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Let’s talk about Andrew Cuomo’s oddly thirsty Yom HaShoah photo
In the public eye, the last two months have been something of a high point for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. His clear, forceful daily briefings on the coronavirus crisis — accompanied by blunt, unintentionally hilarious homemade PowerPoints — have won him legions of new fans. New Yorkers, accustomed to viewing their elected officials with…
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No, the way sex is portrayed in ‘Unorthodox’ is not accurate — it’s a hateful libel
The four-part Netflix series ‘Unorthodox’ is the latest in a growing mini-industry of books and television programs depicting the inner working of the Hasidic community to an apparently vast market of fascinated observers. It has justly been praised for the attention to detail paid in accurately depicting clothes, haircuts, furniture, Hebrew accents and, in a…
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