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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The Secret Jewish History Of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Beloved Infidel’
Sheilah Graham, longtime Hollywood gossip columnist and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lover and muse, was delighted to share her personal history, especially its romantic highlights. She wrote no fewer than 10 tell-alls. But while Graham earned her living by exposing the secrets and foibles of others, one fact you won’t find in her autobiographical work is…
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We Need To Talk About How Israeli Men Treat American Women
When I took a Birthright trip to Israel, the main attraction was not the land. It was our Israeli security guard. His name was Uri or Guy or something — one of those names we don’t have in America that means “pebble” or “biblical general.” He seemed mute. And he was as fresh from army…
The Latest
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‘Very Biblical’ Doesn’t Mean What Jeff Sessions And Sarah Huckabee Sanders Think It Means
Attorney General Jefferson Sessions, recent recipient of a justice award from the Orthodox Union, had some bone-chilling commentary on the Bible this week, claiming it justified separating children and parents at the border—and using the same part of the New Testament, Romans 13, that had once been used to justify slavery. But let’s parse what…
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Music What It’s Like To Play The First Cantor In Opera History
Jews have always had a complicated relationship with opera. Ostracized in European society, Jewish composers and librettists had few chances to make professional headway; perhaps the most successful of them, Mozart collaborator Lorenzo da Ponte, converted to Christianity. The most influential late-Romantic opera composer, Richard Wagner, was a notorious anti-Semite. And prior to the mid-19th…
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Can Natalie Portman And Jonathan Safran Foer Save The World From Humans?
It’s difficult to tell 98% of your audience that they are inhumanly cruel and then not lose them. But that’s what producers Jonathan Safran Foer, Natalie Portman and Christopher Dillon Quinn hope to do with “Eating Animals.” It’s a new movie whose subject is the production and consumption of food from animals, loosely based on…
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History Of Watership Down
Richard Adams never intended his 1972 novel, “Watership Down,” to be an allegory. And a book about a group of rabbits certainly doesn’t have a Jewish ring to it. Chocolate versions of them are eaten to celebrate Easter. They aren’t even kosher animals — despite the fact that they chew the cud, they don’t have…
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Music ‘Yiddish Under The Stars’ Turns Central Park Into Fabulous ‘Panoply Of Sounds’
Central Park’s annual SummerStage Festival, typically the domain of Americana artists like Rhiannon Giddens, rap veterans including Public Enemy, indie rock legends such as the Feelies, latter-day folkies like the Indigo Girls, jazz artists including McCoy Tyner and Roy Haynes, and Afropop stars such as King Sunny Adé, took on a decidedly Ashkenazic tinge last…
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At Historic Synagogue, A Hopeful Meditation On Loss Takes Flight
The aluminum chairs — off-kilter and whimsically rugged, as if Chagall had ventured into furniture-making — soar above the women’s balcony, held aloft by two golden birds. Sunlight, softened through stained glass, bounces off the pair’s upturned legs. The sculpture, by Kiki Smith, a renowned sculptor and printmaker, is called “Homecoming.” It’s easy to think,…
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Art The Secret Jewish History Of Rosie The Riveter
At the end of World War II, fascism seemed to have met its well-deserved end, a result far from inevitable when the conflict began. The New York Historical Society exhibit “Rockwell, Roosevelt, & the Four Freedoms,” open through September 2, reminds visitors how fragile democracy appeared at the time. While American men served overseas, women’s…
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The Secret Jewish History Of The World Cup
The World Cup comes around every four years, just like the Olympic Games, except the Olympics are for amateurs. And if you’re an American, chances are you are indifferent at best or totally oblivious at worst about the single thing that, more than any other, unites all humanity. The World Cup is reportedly the most…
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The Melodramatic, Bloated, Indulgent Brilliance of Luchino Visconti
On April 15, 1944, in Rome, Fascist soldiers captured Luchino Visconti di Modrone, the Count of Lonate Pozzolo. Since the late thirties, the Count had been a loyal Communist, sheltering party members in his mansion and even selling family jewels to fund Mussolini’s defeat. As Peter Bondanella explains in “A History of Italian Cinema,” Visconti…
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Yiddish אַ זעלטענע זאַך אין פּאַריז — אַ קאָנפֿערענץ בלויז וועגן די ליטוואַקעסA rare event in Paris — a conference just about the Litvaks
צוליב דעם וואָס ס׳רובֿ פּאַריזער אַשכּנזים שטאַמען פֿון פּוילן, קומט די ליטוויש־ייִדישע קולטור נישט אָפֿט צו רייד
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