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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Happy 89th Birthday, Harold Bloom!
Harold Bloom, the American Jewish literary critic, has divided opinions during his extremely prolific career, from adulation to obloquy. His landmark books speak for themselves, including “The Anxiety of Influence” (1973),, “A Map of Misreading” (1975), “Agon (1982), “Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible” (1989), and “The Western Canon” (1994), An…
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Woody Allen: ‘I Would Probably Die On A Film Set’
Woody Allen plans to die in the director’s chair. “Since I started, I’ve always tried to focus on my work, no matter what happens in my family or with politics. I don’t think about social movements,” Allen told press at San Sebastian, Spain on July 9, a day before he began filming a new project,…
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Midnight Movie Maven And Coen Brothers Patron Ben Barenholtz Dies At 83
Film producer and distributor Ben Barenholtz, who spent his youth hiding from Nazis in the Ukrainian woods and grew up to popularize midnight movie screenings, died June 27 at a Prague hospital. He was 83. His death was reported by his executor, Sony Pictures Classics executive Tom Prassis, who said that Barenholtz, who had been…
The Latest
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The Astonishingly Menschy Side Of Bob Dylan
Dylan & Me: 50 Years of Adventures By Louie Kemp, with a foreword by Kinky Friedman West Rose Press 240 pages It’s a story familiar to anyone who ever attended summer camp. You hit it off with another kid, mostly over a shared sense of humor and mutual feelings of being slightly different than the…
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How An 8th-Century Jewish Text Ended Up In A Buddhist Cave Temple In China
Approaching the Mogao Grottoes in Gansu, a province in northwest China, it’s hard to imagine the sights that lie in store. The holes in the cliff can appear, from a distance, to be nothing more than a strange rock formation etched into the face of a sand-beaten desert ridge. It is only as you get…
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‘Leaving Eden’ Gives The Creation Story A Feminist Spin
Playwright Jenny Waxman has been obsessed with Adam’s first wife, Lilith, since she was a student in Orthodox Jewish day school. Of course, they didn’t teach about her there. “I knew there was more and I was hungry for more than what I was being told,” Waxman, who is also a theatrical producer with her…
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The Secret Jewish History Of ‘Shaft’
Hold on. Before you get all “cultural appropriation” on me, hear me out. The character “Shaft” is not now, nor has he ever been, Jewish. Nor has he been portrayed by Jews in film or TV, nor was he conjured by a Jewish artist. Early on in his fictional life, however, Shaft was among Jews,…
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Q&A: Lexi Rabadi On Bringing Hannah Senesh To Life
Hannah Senesh was just 23 when she was captured, tortured and executed by Nazi-allied Hungarian authorities – but she had already lived many lives. Born the privileged daughter of a Hungarian journalist and playwright, Senesh became a Zionist at an early age, moving to Mandatory Palestine after graduating high school in 1939. She was by…
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Giving Voice To Jewish Characters In Children’s Literature — A Conversation with Lesléa Newman
When I was a little girl attending public school in northern New Jersey, I would get excited every time I saw a Jewish person represented in a story. Growing up on a steady diet of Dr. Seuss, “The Black Stallion” and “A to Z Mysteries,” I noticed that there were hardly any Jewish characters in…
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‘Annie’ Lyricist And Director Martin Charnin Dies At 84
Martin Charnin, the Emmy, Grammy and Tony-winning director, composer and lyricist who brought a white-eyed, red-haired comic strip orphan to vivid life on stage died July 6 at the age of 84. Charnin’s daughter Sasha Charnin Morrison reported his death to The Washington Post. Charnin passed at a hospital in White Plains, N.Y. three days…
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The Secret Jewish History Of The Tour De France
To paraphrase comedian Jackie Mason, is there a bigger schmuck in the world than a Jew on a bicycle? He might be right; after all, the link between Jews and cycling is seemingly tenuous. But, as the most prestigious cycling event in the world gets underway, there is an intriguing connection between Jews and the…
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