Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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Theater Jason Alexander lives out a lifelong dream, playing Tevye in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
'I wanted to do a piece that is proudly Semitic' said the Tony winner and ‘Seinfeld' star
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Why Thankfulness And Gratitude Are Jewish Emotions
For most of my life, I didn’t consider gratitude a particularly Jewish emotion. Quite the contrary. I grew up a secular Jew, my cultural knowledge filtered through Neil Simon and Philip Roth more than the Talmud or rabbis. So to me, anxiety, guilt, resentment, constant nervousness about diseases like sciatica and bursitis — those were…
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Historian Ron Chernow Will Hold Dais At The White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Next year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner may not be as controversial — or funny — as this year’s. The WHCA announced on November that Ron Chernow, the Pulitzer-winning biographer of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and John D. Rockefeller, will be the featured speaker of the festivities on April 27, 2019. The selection of Chernow…
The Latest
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Film & TV With ‘The Kominsky Method’ Chuck Lorre Gets The Netflix Boost
A welcome, if counterintuitive, symptom of the age of Netflix has been the revival of old Hollywood careers. It may have all started with 2015’s “Grace and Frankie” which gave a starring platform to Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, whom studios had tended to neglect or bury in grandma roles. In “Grace and Frankie” Tomlin…
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How seltzer won Israel’s war for independence
'Cast a Giant Shadow' is like 'Exodus' with a shpritz bottle
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Art How Rube Goldberg Made America Complicated Again
You push a button. A spring releases a bowling ball, which hurtles down a ramp toward a switch that uncages a bird, whose beak twirls a dial that activates the printer that spits out your ticket. That’s not actually how admission to “The Art of Rube Goldberg” works, but it’s how the legendary cartoonist might…
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A Seder For Thanksgiving Is The Trick To A Peaceful Holiday
I’d be surprised if anyone’s Thanksgiving ever looked like Norman Rockwell’s iconic Saturday Evening Post cover. Even if you Photoshopped in some diverse complexions, it’s the harmony of the gathering — its radiant togetherness — that makes it seem so unearthly. Where’s the divorcing couple insisting that you take a side? Where’s your drunk uncle…
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Art Remembering Oskar Rabin, Soviet Painter, Dissident And Exile
Oskar Rabin, a leading figure in subversive Soviet art who first gained international attention for hanging from a moving bulldozer, died November 7 in Florence. He was 90 years old. Rabin was in Florence for an exhibition of his work, The New York Times reports. The filmmaker Evgeny Smoljanski, who directed a documentary about the…
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Film & TV In A Conservative Israeli Town, She Came Out As Trans. This Documentary Tracks Her Journey.
The Israeli documentary “Family in Transition” has a happy ending. Sort of. The film, directed by Ofir Trainin, is about the Tzuk family — father Amit, mother Galit and their four children — who live in Nahariya, Israel’s northernmost coastal city. Amit and Galit run a successful software design and programming firm. But four years…
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10 Rules For Novelists From The Greatest Living American Writer
If you are writing a novel, remember that all your competition has already died, except for Joyce Carol Oates, who is undead. Your enemies are watching you via a porthole from hell, and they are envious. The reader is your enemy, for they are idiots who sometimes watch TV. The only acceptable TV is “The…
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Theater ‘Heil Hitler!’ He Yelled During ‘Fiddler.’ The Audience Feared For Their Lives.
Lyn Levine, 26, heard a commotion from the balcony. But it was only when she heard a man shout “Go home, Nazi” that she got a clue what was happening. Someone had said something anti-Semitic, she realized. People were moving quickly out of the way. Faces showed surprise, confusion. “The first thing that went through…
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Theater Yiddish Fiddler Will Move Off-Broadway In February
It’s next year in Midtown for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Playbill reports that the all-Yiddish production of the musical, directed by the legendary performer Joel Grey and translated into Yiddish by Shraga Friedman, will transfer from lower Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage to Off-Broadway’s Stage 42 where it…
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