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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Award-Winning Memoirist Lucette Lagnado Dies At 62
Lucette Lagnado, the award-winning author who documented her family’s exodus from Egypt to America, has died at 62. The Jewish Book Council, which awarded Lagnado the Sami Rohr Prize in 2008, announced her passing. Lagnado was born to a Jewish family in Cairo in 1956. In 1963, during a wave of mass exodus by Jews…
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A Young Argentine-Jewish Filmmaker Takes On His Country’s Authoritarian Past
Benjamín Naishtat’s “Rojo” begins with what seems like a wish-fulfillment fantasy of a very specific sort. Claudio (Argentine actor Dario Grandinetti, of such films as Almodóvar’s “Talk to Her”), a lawyer in a provincial Argentine town in the mid-1970s, is waiting for his wife at a nice, if modest, local restaurant. He’s approached by an…
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No One’s Studying Hebrew Anymore — That’s A Big Problem
College enrollment in Hebrew courses is dropping sharply, and this downward spiral may soon have profound effects on the American Jewish community. Modern Hebrew enrollment fell 17.6 percent between 2013 and 2016, according to a report from the Modern Languages Association, while Biblical Hebrew suffered a 23.9% decline. The number of Hebrew students has been…
The Latest
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Philip Roth’s Estate Auction Shows His Simple, Sturdy, American Side
You can now own Philip Roth’s Balinese shadow puppet, area rugs or Pat and Richard Nixon collectible plate. Litchfield County Auctions, which runs estate auctions for the Connecticut county in which Roth lived part-time for decades, has posted a lineup of over 100 items owned by the Pulitzer-winning author, who died in May of 2018….
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Happy 89th Birthday, Harold Bloom!
Harold Bloom, the American Jewish literary critic, has divided opinions during his extremely prolific career, from adulation to obloquy. His landmark books speak for themselves, including “The Anxiety of Influence” (1973),, “A Map of Misreading” (1975), “Agon (1982), “Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible” (1989), and “The Western Canon” (1994), An…
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Woody Allen: ‘I Would Probably Die On A Film Set’
Woody Allen plans to die in the director’s chair. “Since I started, I’ve always tried to focus on my work, no matter what happens in my family or with politics. I don’t think about social movements,” Allen told press at San Sebastian, Spain on July 9, a day before he began filming a new project,…
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Midnight Movie Maven And Coen Brothers Patron Ben Barenholtz Dies At 83
Film producer and distributor Ben Barenholtz, who spent his youth hiding from Nazis in the Ukrainian woods and grew up to popularize midnight movie screenings, died June 27 at a Prague hospital. He was 83. His death was reported by his executor, Sony Pictures Classics executive Tom Prassis, who said that Barenholtz, who had been…
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The Astonishingly Menschy Side Of Bob Dylan
Dylan & Me: 50 Years of Adventures By Louie Kemp, with a foreword by Kinky Friedman West Rose Press 240 pages It’s a story familiar to anyone who ever attended summer camp. You hit it off with another kid, mostly over a shared sense of humor and mutual feelings of being slightly different than the…
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How An 8th-Century Jewish Text Ended Up In A Buddhist Cave Temple In China
Approaching the Mogao Grottoes in Gansu, a province in northwest China, it’s hard to imagine the sights that lie in store. The holes in the cliff can appear, from a distance, to be nothing more than a strange rock formation etched into the face of a sand-beaten desert ridge. It is only as you get…
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‘Leaving Eden’ Gives The Creation Story A Feminist Spin
Playwright Jenny Waxman has been obsessed with Adam’s first wife, Lilith, since she was a student in Orthodox Jewish day school. Of course, they didn’t teach about her there. “I knew there was more and I was hungry for more than what I was being told,” Waxman, who is also a theatrical producer with her…
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The Secret Jewish History Of ‘Shaft’
Hold on. Before you get all “cultural appropriation” on me, hear me out. The character “Shaft” is not now, nor has he ever been, Jewish. Nor has he been portrayed by Jews in film or TV, nor was he conjured by a Jewish artist. Early on in his fictional life, however, Shaft was among Jews,…
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