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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Philip Roth And The Yiddish Tradition
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the course of their ongoing debate, the literary critic Irving Howe used to complain that Philip Roth’s writing suffered from a weak connection to the Jewish tradition and that he was a writer with a “thin personal culture.” What strikes us more than 40 years later,…
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What The Ayatollah Means By ‘Eradicating’ Israel
Let me begin by thanking Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei of Iran and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly for the opportunity to investigate the word “eradicate.” I never thought I’d have the chance to express gratitude to Khamenei and Goldberg in the same sentence, but these are strange times. When the President of the United…
The Latest
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Bruce Lee Was Jewish?
Was Bruce Lee really Jewish? The new Bruce Lee biography, “Bruce Lee: A Life”, comes with a few surprising revelations. Written by Matthew Polly and published on June 5, 2018 by Simon & Schuster “Bruce Lee: A Life” is the monumental new biography of the martial arts film star and cultural icon. Brice Lee was…
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Ilana Kurshan Wins Sami Rohr Prize For ‘If All The Seas Were Ink’
Ilana Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir” has won the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. “If All the Seas Were Ink” recounts the years in which Kurshan, recovering from the dissolution of her first marriage at age 27, undertook the project of reading the entire Talmud, one page per day….
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Atticus Finch, Harper Lee’s Father And The Jewish Settler Movement
One day in September 1933, shortly after having been bailed out of jail, a middle-aged, partially paralyzed black man named Dennis Cross answered a knock at his front door in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His visitors, pretending to be police officers, were in fact white civilians, and they were incensed that Cross had been accused of sexually…
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How Alison Klayman’s Jewish Education Prepared Her To Confront Adderall
Alison Klayman, a graduate of a Jewish day school with a history degree from Brown, is no stranger to the documentary world: Her film “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” (2012), which followed the Chinese artist and activist, received a special jury prize that year at Sundance and opened Tel Aviv’s 2012 Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival….
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Did Michael Pollan Kill God?
Michael Pollan had enlightenment envy. Unlike most patients in clinical trials of psilocybin, when Pollan ate a magic mushroom, he wasn’t terrified by a terminal illness, he wasn’t suffering from alcoholism or depression and he hadn’t been diagnosed with a personality disorder. But he “envied the radical new perspectives” of the people in psychedelic therapy…
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15 Can’t-Miss Summer Events Starting With Yiddish ‘Fiddler’
My best memories of summer are of the arts: Catching a B.B. King concert in a Denver August downpour; waiting in the humid heat for a free ticket to “My Fair Lady” at the Muny in St. Louis; spreading a jacket on the beach at Coney Island and watching the riveting and under-recognized “Crown Heights”…
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Music The Secret Jewish History Of Jay-Z And Beyoncé
Beyoncé and Jay-Z, the first couple of pop music, kick off their second co-headlining stadium tour — dubbed the On the Run II Tour — on June 6 in Cardiff, Wales (home to about two in five Jews in Wales, or about 800 total). The tour will run through Europe for a month and a…
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Hollywood: Where Jews Don’t Get To Play Jews
I was 4 or 5 when the hot topic at dinner was the movie version of “Marjorie Morningstar.” Too young to understand why Mom was unhappy about it, I understood enough to get that Natalie Wood, a goy, had been cast in the title role in the screen adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel. But why…
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In These Sacred Spaces, Judaism, Islam And Christianity Intersect
Christians in Muslim countries face violence and harassment. The same goes for Muslims in Christian countries and Israel. And, as Tom Lehrer sang, “everybody hates the Jews.” This isn’t new information, and many before me have pointed out the irony that the three main Abrahamic religions are so often at each other’s throats. Even if…
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