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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The Secret Jewish History Of Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour, the French singer and songwriter of Armenian origin who died on October 1 at age 94, made a career out of incarnating vulnerable minorities. Aznavour was a fragile, diminutive man with haggard, lined features, even in his thirties. His large, liquid eyes, capable of expressing a range of emotions from rapture to terror,…
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The Secret Jewish History Of ‘A Star Is Born’
Like the cicadas that spend most of their lives underground, emerging only every 13 or 17 years (and how they decide is for you to know and me to find out), the movie musical “A Star Is Born” gets remade every few decades or so. The latest incarnation, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, is…
The Latest
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The Path to Enlightenment: Muslims, Brothers, Jews
During a recent visit to Paris, I had a remarkable encounter that affirmed my faith in humanity. At a dinner party hosted by dear friends Annie Cohen-Solal and Marc Mézard, my wife and I met two extraordinary octogenarians whom Le Monde calls “les jumeaux de l’Islam,” the twins of Islam.) Adel Rifaat and Bahgat Elnadi…
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Music How An Irish Playwright Found The Soul Of Bob Dylan
About a quarter way into Conor McPherson’s play with music, “Girl From the North Country” (running through Sunday, December 9, at the Public Theater in lower Manhattan), a bible salesman unaccountably mutters this apparent non sequitur: Big storm’s coming, my boy. Here. Europe. Everywhere. You ever wonder what woulda happened if the Jews met the…
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Film & TV Matthew Weiner Doesn’t Remember Misconduct With ‘Mad Men’ Writer
Matthew Weiner was reflecting on his management style this Yom Kippur, but continues to deny charges of misconduct involving a female employee. In a Vanity Fair profile released in advance of the “Mad Men” creator’s new Amazon series, “The Romanoffs,” Joy Press, the piece’s writer, noted that Weiner appeared “palpably nervous, his conversation a tangle…
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Why Transliteration Matters
As defined by Merriam-Webster’s, “transliteration” means “to represent or spell in the characters of another alphabet.” And, one unexpected aspect of writing about language is learning how many people around the world turn out to be passionately concerned with transliteration. For example, I have received numerous missives on the spelling of mamaloshn, or “mother tongue”…
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How A Lost 1955 Bar Mitzvah Album And Its Owner Were Reunited
On Thursday, September 20, 2018 at the Jewel-Osco supermarket in Chicago, Jenni Spinner, a freelance writer and editor, found a 1955 Bar Mitzvah album on top of a stack of Lagunitas IPA 12 packs in the liquor department. What such an interesting personal item was doing there we still don’t know, but thanks to some…
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A Stand-Up Tragedy From The Mind Of David Grossman
After two hours and 40 minutes of brutal self-flagellation, Dov Greenstein stumbled exhaustedly around a raised wooden stage strewn with flowers: his shirt torn, his pants ripped, his face battered and painted with blood. “I’m a little tired now,” he said, exhaling as the lights dimmed and the stage faded to black at the end…
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Film & TV From An Exiled Filmmaker, A Rock ‘N’ Roll Parable
“I’ve lived for eight months as if on the other side of the mirror,” an exasperated Kirill Serebrennikov told a judge in Moscow on April 18 of this year. It was the Russian-Jewish director’s most recent day in court since being placed under house arrest last August on corruption charges that are widely considered to…
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October 3: Manhattan: Judy Gold Honors Sharp-Witted Joan Rivers
Joan Rivers, known for her sharp tongue and self-deprecating humor, was a female pioneer in the field of American comedy. Buy tickets here. Join comedian Judy Gold and Rivers’s niece Caroline Waxler for night full of controversial humor à la Rivers on October 3 at the American Jewish Historical Society in Manhattan. Beginning at 7…
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Sartre, The Kavanaugh Hearings And The Politics Of ‘Bad Faith’
Bad faith is very much in the news. As the media relentlessly remind us, Republicans are tirelessly accusing Democrats of bad faith, while Democrats relentlessly blast Republicans for the same sin. But Jean-Paul Sartre, the thinker who immortalized the phrase, would argue that what he called “mauvaise foi” is not only quite different, but it…
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