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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6 Surprising Ways To Use A Shofar
Being little more than a husk of keratin hacked off the head of a ram, the shofar is not a very versatile instrument. Because there’s no real mechanism to alter pitch within the hollow horn, the burden is on the blower, who can modulate tones using his or her lips, teeth or tip-of-the tongue. For…
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Serial Season 3 Will Follow Cases In Cleveland Criminal Court
Serial” first gripped listeners in 2014 (and Kim Kardashian as recently as last month) with the case of Adnan Syed, a young man convicted of murdering his high school girlfriend. The podcast’s second season, which had more mixed reviews, centered on Bowe Bergdahl, an army sergeant kidnapped by the Taliban. Now, the hit show has…
The Latest
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Film & TV Meet David Fantle, Interviewer To The Golden Age Stars
40 years ago David Fantle and his writing partner, Tom Johnson, saved up enough money from their summer jobs to fly to Los Angeles for interviews with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. They were 18-years-old Minnesotans with no credentials other than chutzpah and a love for Golden Age cinema. They had never done anything like…
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Music For Paul Simon On His Retirement — Wisdom From My Grandpa Joe
My grandfather had a surprise for me. Seven years after buying his 1971 Buick LeSabre, he’d finally decided to get with the times and install an eight-track cassette player under the car’s dashboard. This in itself was not surprising, as he was a talented amateur pianist and violinist who genuinely loved music, even if his…
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Young Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear’ — How Would He Influence History?
Little did I suspect that Bob Woodward, my closest college friend, would bring down a president and become what many people have called “the greatest investigative reporter of all time.” I think of him often, especially now with “Fear,” his book about the Trump White House, which is being published on September 11. I first…
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From 1898 — Why Plagues And Fires Make A Good New Year
Rosh Hashanah! Thousands of poor, addled, hapless but sincerely devoted Jews stand and plead with the Master of the Universe for a good year. Surrounded by all manner of hypocrites who petition, weep and exhort alongside them — folks who strive to cut a ‘“deal” with their God. They point out how three days a…
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NBC Orders “Law & Order: Hate Crimes”
For all its successes, there are a couple “Law & Order” variations that have died on the vine. Who could forget — or rather, who can remember — the single season clunkers “Law & Order: LA” and “Law & Order: Trial By Jury?” Now, Variety reports, a new riff on the old procedural formula is…
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How I Grew Up With ‘Fiddler On The Roof’
“They’re doing ‘Fiddler’ in Yiddish,” a friend recently told my husband and me. “You both speak it, right?” “Only what I picked up from my parents,” I said. “Household Yiddish,” Martin joked. “We know the words for complaining.” “There are subtitles,” she said, offering to get tickets for us to join her and her husband….
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7 Questions For Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari is concerned about our bad decisions. Whereas the Oxford-educated Israeli historian and academic’s past work examined the far-flung past and the way-off future, his third book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (Spiegel & Grau), brings his insights to the here-and-now into a call to action. Harari believes that unless we heed…
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Q & A: Norm Eisen Is Leading The Legal Charge Against Trump —And Bringing Prague’s 20th-Century To Life
Among the many oddities of the President Trump years is the extent to which relatively obscure government officials — the kind who, in any other administration, would barely register in the public consciousness — have become subjects of fascination. Hubbubs have been made over the many civil servants who have conscientiously resigned, often through the…
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Nothing Succeeds Like Gary Shteyngart’s ‘Success’
Lake Success: A Novel Gary Shteyngart Random House, 352 pages, $28 Barry Cohen is a hero for our time. The protagonist of Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, “Lake Success,” he is master of the universe, or at least of Wall Street, although really, he is waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is 2016, and…
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