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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Another Hidden Jewish Girl — But Not Anne Frank
The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found By Bart van Es Penguin Press, 304 pages, $28 It’s impossible to think of the Holocaust in the Netherlands without conjuring the ghost of Anne Frank. And though Frank and her diary were exceptional, her story embodies the opposing fates of Dutch…
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No, That New ‘Anne Frank’ Production Doesn’t Cast Nazis As ICE. But It’s Still Provocative.
The story of Anne Frank humanizes a period of history defined by horrors that can often feel beyond the scope of our comprehension. Since 1955, the stage adaptation of Frank’s writings by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett has brought her story to life, serving as an object lesson in what it is to be human…
The Latest
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Art Mandrakes, Dragons, Jews — And Other Monsters Of Medieval Times
The mandrake is a small, perennial plant that grows in warm Mediterranean climates. Its flowers are a pretty shade of purple, but its roots can be deadly. Pluck a mandrake from the soil and you’ll find a tiny man hanging down underneath the leaves, screaming loudly enough to kill anyone nearby. The only safe way…
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How Much Did Hitler’s Speeches Really Help The Nazis?
Adolf Hitler was renowned for his persuasiveness as a speaker. “Here was a born natural orator,” wrote future Irish ambassador to Berlin Daniel Binchy after seeing Hitler speak in 1921. “He began slowly, almost hesitatingly, stumbling over the construction of his sentences, correcting his dialect pronunciation. Then all at once he seemed to take fire.”…
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Film & TV Can Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’ Solve a 44-Year Old Murder? Stephen King’s Son Thinks So.
1974 was among the worst years of Steven Spielberg’s young life. His second feature, “Jaws” ran over time and over budget. The mechanical shark — known to the crew as “Bruce” — kept malfunctioning. Shooting at sea proved more difficult than anyone could imagine. The film’s most bankable actor, Robert Shaw, was often drunk on…
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Film & TV As Robert Redford Retires, Revisiting His Most Jewish Moments
Yes, we know: Robert Redford, razor-jawlined golden boy of American cinema, is not Jewish. And yet! The actor and director, who announced his intention to retire from the former vocation on August 6, has spent many years meaningfully adjacent to American Jewish culture. He romanced Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were,” served as Paul…
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Film & TV New York Film Festival To Feature Films From Coen Brothers, Frederick Wiseman
This year’s New York Film Festival will mark a major moment for Jewish film. The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which hosts the 56-year old festival, announced the festival’s main slate lineup on August 7. Filmmaker brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, 88-year old documentarian Frederick Wiseman and visual artist Julian Schnabel are on the bill…
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Film & TV Jeffrey Katzenberg Hits $1 Billion Benchmark For His Short-Form Streaming Platform
In a DVD extra for his 2006 film “Inland Empire” the director David Lynch said, “If you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film.” But Lynch’s exhortation hasn’t stopped ex-DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who’s betting big money that tablet and mobile viewing of cinema-quality content…
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Theater How Sholem Aleichem Became The Hottest Writer In New York
Who would’ve thought that the hottest tickets in town this summer of 2018 would be for two shows adapting the stories of the great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem? While both are well-executed and deserving of the mostly rave reviews they’ve received, neither is particularly innovative or cutting-edge from a theatrical standpoint. It would be a…
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Art How A New Mexico Jewish Couple May Have Pulled Off A $160 Million Art Heist
It appears that Jewish couple Rita and Jerry Alter walked away from a 1985 trip to an Arizona museum with quite the souvenir. After Rita’s death in 2017, the Alters’ home in New Mexico was found to contain a long-lost Willem de Kooning painting, worth $160 million, yet no evidence had previously linked them to…
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Bookseller And Library Archivist Charged With Stealing $8 Million Worth Of Books
What’s a bookstore owner to do when he’s strapped for cash? If he’s John Ezra Schulman, proprietor of Caliban Books in Oakland, Pennsylvania, he may — allegedly — pilfer rare books in excess of $8 million dollars from his local library. For almost two decades, Schulman got away with it. The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle reports…
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