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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How The War Against Sexual Harassment Was Won
Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment By Linda Hirshman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 316 pages, $27 It’s hard to write history while it’s happening. One pitfall is the problem of assessing just how powerful a movement or trend really is. To wit: Is the current #MeToo furor the harbinger of a social revolution?…
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WATCH: The Musical Legacy Of Velvel Pasternak
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s no exaggeration to say that the renaissance of traditional Eastern-European Jewish music of the 1970s and 1980s would have never occurred without the work of the ethnomusicologist and musician Velvel Pasternak, who died on June 11th. The dozens of books of Jewish music released by his…
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Director Of Berlin’s Jewish Museum Resigns After BDS Controversy
Peter Schäfer, the embattled director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum resigned on June 14 following fresh controversy surrounding his involvement in the boycott, divestment and sanctions dialogue, a source of growing contention in Germany. Schäfer, a former Princeton professor of Judaic Studies who is not Jewish, was questioned for his leadership in past months. But his…
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My Bubbe, The Bull And The Kabbalah Of Catching A Foul Ball
It’s a weird thing to admit, perhaps, but my most vivid memory of my first major league baseball game involves foul balls. Sure, I still remember how awestruck I was by the hulking, battleship-like presence of Detroit’s old Tiger Stadium, and by how lush and lurid the green of the field appeared in contrast with…
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Leonard Cohen’s Letters To His Muse Snagged $876,000 At Christie’s
Leonard Cohen’s letters, alongside other artifacts belonging to the late poet and songwriter’s one-time muse and lover Marianne Ihlen, have sold for $876,000 in an auction by Christies. Many of the items exceeded their initial asking prices. Among the auctioned items was a bronze bell that once adorned the wall of Cohen and Ihlen’s home…
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RBG Appears At Broadway Play About The Constitution, Drawing Tears And Cheers
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended a Saturday evening performance of Heidi Schreck’s “What The Constitution Means to Me” this weekend, prompting tears from the cast and a mid-show standing ovation from the audience. Ginsburg is perhaps known more for her love of opera than for plays, but the concern of Schreck’s Pulitzer-nominated work…
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Music Woody Guthrie’s Jewish Soul And The Tale Of A Tulsa Tallis
In the summer of 2014, on the strength of a BMI-Woody Guthrie Fellowship, I spent a glorious few weeks researching in the archives in the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The materials I found there not only fed into the writing of two books on Guthrie, but they also revealed some of the least…
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Jim Dine On His Jewish Fate And The Fate Of The Jews
The American artist Jim Dine, who will be 84 on June 16, has just produced a new book, [“Jewish Fate” (Steidl Publishers)](Steidl Publishers ““Jewish Fate” (Steidl Publishers)”) an evocation in free verse and imagery of his boyhood, working in the Cincinnati hardware store of his grandfather, Morris Cohen. Emerging from the generation of U.S. pop…
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Film & TV Remembering Sylvia Miles — A Born Truth-Teller
The American Jewish actress Sylvia Miles, who died on June 12 at age 94, proved that Jewish truth telling can simultaneously make and break a performance career. Miles’ devotion to verisimilitude was such that even fellow thespians were deceived by her artistry. After seeing John Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy” (1969) one of her two Oscar-nominated performances,…
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Trump, Forgetting Jonah Incident, Admits To Talks With Prince Of Whales
On June 13, President Trump, in a quickly-deleted tweet, alluded to meetings he had with the Prince of Whales among other world leaders. Many were quick to deride Trump for seeming to misspell Prince Charles of England’s title, but those critics overlook the true gaffe — the real reason why Trump removed the tweet. Not…
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Velvel Pasternak, Champion Of Traditional Jewish Music, Dies At 86
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Velvel Pasternak, the publisher, scholar and nonpareil Jewish music historian primarily known for his expertise on the music of Hasidism, has died. He was 86 years old. Pasternak was born in Toronto, Canada into a religious family descended from the Modzitz Hasidim. At the age of 16…
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