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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7 Questions For Barry Avrich, Director Of ‘Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World Of Ben Ferencz’
Only a day after he learned about Ben Ferencz, the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, filmmaker Barry Avrich was in contact and getting ready to make a documentary about him. The resulting film, “Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz,” now playing at New York’s Cinema Village and opening in select cities Friday March 1,…
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Mapped In Recipes, A Savage Landscape Of Jewish Hunger
A few years after I learned to read, I encountered a formative image in one of Sydney Taylor’s “All of a Kind Family” books. I remember it with absolute clarity: A daughter admires her mother’s figure, unique among the Eastern European Jewish women of the Lower East Side. They tend, she thinks, to look like…
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Film & TV ‘Green Book’ Got Racism Wrong; This 1964 Film Got It Right
You may have heard that people are upset about “Green Book” winning the 2019 Oscar for Best Movie. Or you may have seen Spike Lee, whose “BlackKklansman” was also up for the award, drain a full glass of champagne rather than respond to a question about what he thought of the film’s victory. The “Green…
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Music What You Need To Know About R. Kelly’s Lawyer, Steve Greenberg
R. Kelly’s latest legal case was never going to be a low profile affair. The “Trapped in the Closet” singer, whose real name is Robert Kelly, was arrested in Chicago Friday, February 22, on charges of aggravated sexual abuse spanning over a decade and involving four women, three of whom were minors at the time,…
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At 95, the heroes of the Ghost Army relive the battles of WWII
The 603rd Camouflage Engineers used inflatable tanks, planes and more to dupe the Germans
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The Secret Jewish History Of Peter Tork
Peter Tork, who died on February 21 at age 77, proved that enduring pop stardom was less meaningful than the quest to understand oneself and the world. Tork won international acclaim as the keyboardist and bass guitarist of the Monkees. His mother Virginia Straus had German Jewish roots, and Tork would include Yiddish phrases in…
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‘Porgy And Bess,’ ‘Akhnaten’ To Lead Met Opera’s 2019-2020 Season
After almost three decades, the Charleston-set “Porgy and Bess” is coming back to the Upper West Side. The Metropolitan Opera’s 2019-2020 season, announced on February 20, will open on September 23 with a new production of Ira and George Gershwin’s folk opera, the first since 1990. The staging, brought over by director James Robinson after…
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Film & TV On Disney Channel’s ‘Andi Mack,’ Yet Another Jewish Story
“Andi Mack” was not on TV last Friday, so my evening was not as enjoyable as it usually was. Almost a year ago, I wrote about how I am a lover of shows on Disney Channel. Some people might find this odd, as I am a childless, middle-aged adult who is not a teacher. However,…
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Film & TV When New Journalism And The New Hollywood Both Died In Darkness
If you watch a lot of films, you might get the sense that journalism is a very dramatic business — there’s a reason why the Washington Post’s Trump-era slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” reads like something you might find on a movie poster. Joan Micklin Silver’s 1977 comedy “Between the Lines,” opening on Friday for…
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What Hebrew Means To Americans
What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) Edited by Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg University of Washington Press, $30 In the 1980s, the king of minimalist fiction, Raymond Carver, published a story titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Both the story…
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Film & TV ‘Curb’ Director Larry Charles Feared Getting Comfortable, Now He’s Swapping Jokes With ISIS
In many ways, Larry Charles has stuck quite close to his creative associate Larry David. They met as writers on the show “Fridays” in the 1980s, collaborated as writer-producers on “Seinfeld” through the ‘90s and continued their partnership well into the new millennium with Charles’ directing on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” But while David, at least…
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