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 Wizard Of Oz’
On its 80th anniversary, “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) remains one of the most influential musical films ever made in Hollywood, in part because of its Jewish inspiration. The film’s wide audience has always included Jewish spectators. The historian Adele Reinhartz has recalled the “religious” devotion with which her Canadian Jewish family binge-watched WoO, followed…
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Q & A: Stephanie Burt On Whether Poetry Matters
Does poetry matter? If you ask Stephanie Burt, the poet, Harvard University English professor and co-editor of poetry at The Nation, the answer is no. Well, almost. Burt, author of the newly-released “Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems,” thinks the word “poetry” does a disservice to poems, obscuring the diversity of…
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David Mamet’s Harvey Weinstein Play Is As Bad As We Expected
In January, we reported with all due chagrin that David Mamet was premiering a play based on Harvey Weinstein on London’s West End. That play, “Bitter Wheat,” opened June 19 and early reviews have us even more confused — not about the play’s quality, but about its baseline reason for existing. In the production, John…
The Latest
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Chagall’s ‘The Lovers’ Covered At The Met In Recognition Of Refugees
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is making a bold statement with one of its boldest holdings. “The Lovers” by Marc Chagall is covered this week in recognition of World Refugee Day on June 20, Artnet reported. The move is part of a partnership between the Met and the International Rescue Committee to draw attention to…
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For Garry Winogrand, All Great Photography Had To Be Jewish
Garry Winogrand was the restless omnivore of photography, the artist who surveyed all of midcentury America and swallowed it whole. In the work he produced between the 50s and the 80s, he embraced everything without ever quite endorsing or prettifying it. He approached his subjects, instead, with a kind of hard-won gusto: a willingness to…
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We’re Arguing About Concentration Camps — But What Does The Term Really Mean?
The use of the phrase “concentration camp” has caused a firestorm on Twitter — this time because New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on June 18 called detention centers at the U.S. border “concentration camps,” language that was swiftly criticized by Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney as demeaning the memory of the Holocaust. After Ocasio-Cortez said in…
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8 Women Accuse Screenwriter Max Landis Of Sexual And Psychological Abuse
The following contains explicit accounts of sexual and psychological abuse Celebrity screenwriter Max Landis, writer of the films “Bright” and “Chronicle” and son of director John Landis, has been accused of physical and emotional abuse by eight women in a sweeping exposé published by The Daily Beast on June 18. Many of the women, some…
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Anti-Semitism Allegations Prompt Penguin To Independent Inquiry Of Controversial Book
Days after defending a book deemed anti-Semitic by online critics, Penguin Random House announced an independent inquiry into its content led by Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger. The book, Colonel Pedro Baños’s “How They Rule Us,” came under scrutiny after the British author Jeremy Duns discovered that the volume originally contained a number of allusions to…
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Like Philip Roth, But Feminist: Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Debut Novel
On page 266 of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” I was filled with sadness, immediately and brutally, as if I had been injected with it. There is nothing particularly sad about page 266; the New York Times Magazine staff writer’s debut novel, while often funny, is pervasively sad, in an intimate, unavoidable way. But…
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For Pauline Kael, Who Reinvented Film Criticism, On Her Hundredth Birthday
In a blistering essay in a 1980 edition of the New York Review Of Books, Renata Adler accused New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael of doing lasting damage to the critical enterprise. Critiquing Kael’s collection “When The Lights Go Down,” Adler wrote that the book revealed the pitfalls of the critic-in-residence post. By giving Kael…
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Bob Dylan Musical ‘Girl From The North Country’ Set For Broadway Run
The music of Bob Dylan is coming to Broadway yet again — but not in the way one might expect. While previous efforts to plop Dylan’s music on the Great White Way include Twyla Tharp’s disastrous 2006 dance piece “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and Archibald MacLeish’s 1971 play, “Scratch,” for which the two poets…
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