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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How Mike Reiss Converted ‘The Simpsons’ To Judaism
Mike Reiss has been a writer for “The Simpsons” for 28 years. He has won 4 Emmy Awards and a Peabody for his work on the show. A multi-talented Harvard graduate — he was president of the Harvard Lampoon — he has also written 18 children’s books, five plays and now a memoir, “Springfield Confidential:…
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The Bizarre Saga Of The Man Who Saved 7,000 Babies
Held during the grim depths of the Great Depression, the 1933–34 Chicago World’s Fair was an audacious celebration of human potential. The “Century of Progress,” as it was dubbed, featured a phantasmagorical display of science and innovation, with dazzling modern architecture and futuristic “homes of tomorrow,” “dream cars” and the like. Its designers, however, were…
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Jerusalem Report Cartoonist, Fired Over Nation-State Caricature, Tells Us What Happened.
A veteran cartoonist was fired from a prominent Israeli magazine this week after publishing a caricature criticizing the Israeli government for a controversial law passed last week defining the country as a Jewish state. Avi Katz, a former staff cartoonist for bi-weekly Jerusalem Report, had been working as a freelancer for the magazine since 2012…
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What Should We Expect From Errol Morris’s Steve Bannon Documentary?
Details are salaciously short, but documentarian Errol Morris appears to have made a film with — of all people — Steve Bannon. We know the film, titled “American Dharma,” will debut at the Venice Film Festival and that it’s meant to be a “dialogue” — a broad description that applies many of Morris’ films —…
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Music Philip Glass, ‘Hamilton’ To Receive Kennedy Center Honors
The selections for this year’s Kennedy Center Honors were announced this morning and, as ever, they’re a who’s who of people it’s hard to imagine otherwise interacting. American Jewish composer Philip Glass is receiving the famous rainbow-banded medal, awarded annually to five artists whose talents have helped shape American culture. Glass is joined in the…
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Why The Nazis Banned This Strauss Opera — Even Though He Collaborated
The composer Richard Strauss has a complicated legacy. Beginning in 1933, Strauss served as the President of the Reichsmusikkammer, the Nazi Reich’s Chamber of Music, a damning collaboration with the regime. But in 2014, prompted by celebrations of Strauss’s 150th birthday, many music scholars took to editorial pages, to reconsider the extent of the artist’s…
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Film & TV A Love Letter To Max Blecher, Scars And All
Pott’s disease is a form of tuberculosis that bypasses the lungs and takes up residency in the bones, particularly the vertebrae. It is this macabre ailment that afflicts Emmanuel, the protagonist of Romanian director Radu Jude’s new film “Scarred Hearts,” playing at Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives starting July 27. By the time the movie begins,…
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Music Barry Goldberg: Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Most Underrated Jew
“Jewish soul brother” is a term Barry Goldberg likes to use when praising his favorite musical tribesmen, and it certainly applies to him, as well. Over the course of his six-decades-and-counting career, the keyboardist, songwriter and producer has had enough musical adventures for three lifetimes, including serving as Bob Dylan’s piano man at the 1965…
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Life, Death And Wrestling With Delacroix’s Angel In Paris
‘You must see the garden,” said the guard, in French, pointing to a door in the Delacroix Museum that my daughter and I hadn’t noticed. It led outside and down two sets of stairs to an exquisite courtyard, a silent oasis below the studio where Eugène Delacroix lived while he struggled to finish his last…
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Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje Longlisted For Man Booker Prize
Rachel Kushner, Sally Rooney and Richard Powers are among the authors longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. The prize, given annually, will be awarded on October 16, following the announcement of a shortlist on September 20. Originally restricted to fiction from Commonwealth countries and Ireland, the prize recently attracted controversy after, starting in 2014,…
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Behold The Jewish Treasures Of The Library Of Congress
I saw censor’s marks for the first time at the Library of Congress, home to a priceless collection of Hebrew books. I opened a 1486 edition of the machzor, a High Holidays prayer book labeled Minhag Roma, or Roman rite — printed in Italy, bound in marbled boards and featuring leather corners — and gasped…
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