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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Velvel Pasternak, Champion Of Traditional Jewish Music, Dies At 86
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Velvel Pasternak, the publisher, scholar and nonpareil Jewish music historian primarily known for his expertise on the music of Hasidism, has died. He was 86 years old. Pasternak was born in Toronto, Canada into a religious family descended from the Modzitz Hasidim. At the age of 16…
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In ‘The Reports On Sarah And Saleem,’ An Affair Enters Dangerous Territory
Saleem and Sarah have a routine. In the mornings, he delivers pastries from the bakery that employs him to Sarah’s cafe. In the evenings, she drives to him in an empty parking lot and they have sex in his van. But this simple arrangement is not so simple. Both are married (Sarah has a toddler;…
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Theater WATCH: The First Trailer For ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ Documentary ‘Miracle Of Miracles’
It seems like “Fiddler” fever may never break. Hot on the heels of the Folksbiene’s Yiddish production of the Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick classic comes a documentary chronicling how the hit musical came to occupy a beloved place in the American songbook — getting there wasn’t easy. In a newly-released trailer for “Fiddler: A…
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Music The Secret Jewish History Of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue
There is a telling moment in “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” a new film by Martin Scorsese that played in theaters for one night only on June 11, before commencing to stream on Netflix on June 12. David Mansfield, who at age 19 played mandolin and pedal-steel guitar on the 1975 Rolling Thunder…
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Is This Book About ‘Global Power’ Anti-Semitic?
A book by a Spanish colonel, released in translation in the U.K. in April, contained several passages about the Rothschilds, George Soros and their purported control over global events in its original Spanish edition according to a concerned author and Twitter user. The book’s cover features grasping octopus tentacles, a regular feature of Third Reich…
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Anne Frank Would Have Turned 90 Today. We’re Still Telling Her Story.
90 years ago today, Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany. Her life was short and full of difficulty. She became an immigrant at age 4, moving to the Netherlands as her family attempted to escape the Nazis. At 13, she moved into the cramped attic, known as the Secret Annex, where she and her…
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Books Behind The Backlash: Ava Duvernay’s Central Park Five Series Prompts Anger At Linda Fairstein
In the days following the release of Netflix’s four-part series “When They See Us,” a call for justice swept the internet. The series, director Ava DuVernay’s dramatization of the infamous wrongful conviction of five black and Latino teens for the 1989 rape of a female jogger in Central Park, spawned a widespread demand that Linda…
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Varian Fry Saved Europe’s Artists From The Nazis. His Story Is Stranger Than Fiction.
The Flight Portfolio By Julie Orringer Knopf, 576 pages, $28.95 If you frequent progressive circles, you have likely encountered some form of this refrain: “If you ever wondered what you would have done during the Holocaust, now is the time to find out.” The answer, as it often happens, is wait. You wait for those…
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Activists In Rome Are Countering Hate Symbols With Art
On the streets of Rome, two factions are engaged in a war of words and images. On one side is a group that appears to have far-right sympathies, scrawling swastikas and Celtic crosses on crosswalks, in alleys and on walls. On the other side: a group countering these symbols with poetry. It started on the…
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Film & TV Spielberg Joins Katzenberg For A Spooky Series You Can Only See At Night
Is Quibi the next big thing?
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Theater Hades Has A Field Day As ‘Hadestown’ And ‘The Ferryman’ Take The Tonys
The Greek realm of the dead had a banner year at the 2019 Tony Awards. If eight wins for Anaïs Mitchell’s “Hadestown,” a folk retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth wasn’t enough, Jez Butterworth’s “The Ferryman,” which alludes to Charon, the famed boatman who carried the dead through the River Styx in its title,…
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