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 Aerosmith
Today, Joe Perry, lead guitarist for Aerosmith, celebrates his 69th birthday. Which is as good an excuse as any, we suppose, to look back on the band’s Jewish roots. Aerosmith was founded in 1970 when a then-drummer named Steve Tyler – a native of Yonkers, N.Y., who had moved to Boston – stumbled upon guitarist…
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Roman Polanski’s Dreyfus Film, Seen As Defense Against Rape Conviction, Wins Venice Award
Roman Polanski’s “An Officer and a Spy (J’Accuse),” the director and convicted child rapist’s film about the Dreyfus affair, has won a prestigious award from the Venice Film Festival. Reviews from the festival noted that, while the film was technically accomplished, Polanski had in interviews drawn direct parallels between his own case and that of…
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The Blood Libel Accusation That Inflamed America
The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town By Edward Berenson W.W. Norton & Company, 271 pages, $26.95 On September 22, 1928, a four-year-old girl, Barbara Griffiths, got lost in the woods around Massena, a small town in upstate New York. Hundreds of townspeople joined in the search. Hours later, someone (to this day, no…
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Remembering The Wisdom Of Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt was born on this date in 1928. In honor of that occasion, we’re reprinting our interview with the late artist, originally published in the Forward on March 15, 1996 “Ask me any question you want and then put it in your own words,” says Sol LeWitt brightly over the phone from Manhattan, where…
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The Secret Jewish History of Tupac Shakur
Tupac Shakur, who died on this day in 1996 at the age of 25, may seem an unlikely candidate for consideration in our pages. At one time, Vice President Dan Quayle said Shakur’s music “has no place in our society”; Shakur was a convicted felon who in a few years was in and out of…
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Venice Audiences Horrified By ‘Painted Bird’ Film
Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel “The Painted Bird” has never been a story for the faint of heart. Following a young boy’s brutal tale of survival during the Holocaust in a vague Eastern European locale, the book includes sequences of incest, rape, murder and the terrible pecking-related death of the titular bird. Now, a film adaptation…
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Film & TV Charlotte Gainsbourg: Not Your Typical Jewish Mother
Charlotte Gainsbourg, 48, has little doubt that, over the course of her career, she has chosen, consciously or unconsciously, “transgressive” projects to compensate for her shyness. “So perhaps that’s why I am attracted to the unexpected,” she said during an interview. She has a soft voice with the hint of a British accent. “Also, I…
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Bruce Lee? Yes. Shammai? Yup. The Talmud Meets Kung Fu In A New Play
In a dramatic episode in the Gemara, the part of the Talmud containing rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is smuggled out of the walls of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin. Once free of the city, the rabbi encounters the general Vespasian in a Roman camp and misidentifies him as “king.” Providence…
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Does Roman Polanski’s New Film Make The Dreyfus Affair About Him?
Since it was first announced, Roman Polanski’s new film about the Dreyfus Affair, his first since the #MeToo movement began, has been raising eyebrows. “An Officer and a Spy (J’Accuse),” retells the story of French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, whose wrongful 1894 conviction for treason sparked a decade-long controversy that became a flashpoint of French…
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The Secret Jewish History of Pink Floyd
Try as hard as they might, Pink Floyd is the band that refuses to die. The group’s founder and original visionary, Syd Barrett, called it quits in 1968, and by any rights it should have ended there. Yet the group has survived the loss of two frontmen and other founding members, and has endured changing…
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Q&A: How The Israeli Baseball Team Bested The Skeptics
Is there any greater underdog story than that of the Jews? How about the Israeli baseball team? In 2017, 28 American Jewish pro ball players — some retired, some in career slumps — packed their bats to play in the World Baseball Classic in Seoul. They were 200-1 projected losers; they ended up sweeping the…
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