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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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Q & A: Aaron Sorkin On What White Liberal Guys Want
What to do about Aaron Sorkin? The writer and director was once a voice of liberal America. We swooned over the grand ideals and political savvy of President Bartlett and his coterie of advisors on “The West Wing.” A 2012 clip from “The Newsroom” in which Jeff Daniels, as news anchor Will McAvoy, tears down…
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They Were German. They Defied Hitler. But What Did They Accomplish?
Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule By Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis Dutton, 542 pages, $30 The most famous episode of German resistance to the Nazis is Operation Valkyrie, the unsuccessful July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler and install a constitutional government to negotiate the end of the war. That joint civilian-military…
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At White House Correspondents’ Dinner Ron Chernow Proved Historians Can Be Funny Too
Historian Ron Chernow took the podium on Saturday, April 27, to deliver the keynote of the 2019 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a post traditionally occupied by a professional comedian. The Alexander Hamilton biographer didn’t strike as contentious a tone as his predecessor, Michelle Wolf, but he did deliver some political zingers throughout his remarks on…
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When Kurt Cobain Spoke Yiddish
Kurt Cobain — guitarist and frontman for the grunge-rock band Nirvana, one of the most influential rock groups of all time — took his own life at age 27, 25 years ago this month. Cobain, who had an abusive childhood, suffered from chronic stomach pain, lifelong depression, drug addiction and a family legacy of suicide….
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Why Is This Passover Different From All Others? In Iceland, It’s Because The Rabbi Lives There.
On the face of it, this year’s Passover in Reykjavik, Iceland resembled last year’s celebration. Both were held in a downtown hotel meeting room set with a dozen long tables. And both had relatively casual atmospheres, featuring bottled water, plastic silverware and bronze and white paper seder plates. But the two holidays couldn’t have been…
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Film & TV Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ Is 40. Can We Still Admire It In 2019?
When Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn began their relationship, she was a 21-year-old college freshman and the adopted daughter of Allen’s longtime partner, Mia Farrow. He was 56 and had already directed “Manhattan.” Their nearly three-decade-long romantic involvement has made the film, which turns 40 on April 25 and involves a love affair between 42-year-old…
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‘Children Of A Lesser God’ Playwright Mark Medoff Is Dead At 79
“Children of a Lesser God” playwright Mark Medoff, whose work elevated deaf actors on stage and screen, died April 23 at the age of 79. Medoff had been battling cancer and passed away in hospice care, Las Cruces Sun News reported. Medoff was born to Jewish parents in Mount Carmel, Illinois on March 18, 1940….
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Cystic Fibrosis Took Her Life. In Her Writing, She Left An Extraordinary Gift.
Mallory Smith’s memoir “Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life” may prove the most difficult book you’ll ever read. Because you know the ending. Smith was just three years old when she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a progressive lung disease for which there is no cure. A defective gene causes a buildup of mucus…
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Oliver Sacks’s Partner On Readying The Author’s Final Book
Oliver Sacks was not a writer who mystified his process, writing quite a bit about how his work came together in books like “On the Move.” But what was it like to edit the neurologist and author? And how, now that he’s passed, did his collaborators put together a new book of his essays? Bill…
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What’s An Ex-CIA Leader Doing On ‘Game Of Thrones’?
Last night’s “Game of Thrones,” the second installment of the hit HBO show’s six-episode final season, saw the ensemble awaiting a climactic siege on the northern holdfast of Winterfell. But little did the keepers of the castle know, as they planted bulwarks and fretted about tactics, that an expert on matters of national security was…
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Jerome Charyn, The Half-Wild Novelist
Jerome Charyn lives in a well-preserved pocket of old New York. Within a block of his home on West 12th Street, near where the grid’s order gives way to angled avenues, is a park that dates back to the early 19th century; a grubby magazine stand; a handful of bodegas; a regularly-location-scouted luncheonette as seen…
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