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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Roseanne Greets Muslim Neighbors With Islamophobia — Until This Happens
In this week’s episode, Roseanne hates on the Muslims. Spoiler alert: By the end, Roseanne gets woke. But how many racist jokes can the season’s highest-rated scripted TV series make without itself being racist? I wonder how I’d feel if Roseanne Conner (played by Jewish actress and comedian Roseanne Barr) made the kind of cracks…
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Associate Of The Swedish Academy Acts Like Philip Roth Character, Denies Philip Roth Nobel — Again
Somewhere, a giddy Wes Anderson is developing a film about an elderly novelist, one of the most lauded and prolific in the world, who spends his late years waiting eagerly for each October, feeling sure that this — this! — is the year he will be given his due, and awarded the world’s most prestigious…
The Latest
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Amos Oz’s Daughter Claims Israeli Authors Can’t Win The Nobel. Is She Right?
Fania Oz-Salzberger, the historian, author and daughter of Amos Oz, took to Twitter to offer what she described as “one tweet and that’s it” on the subject of Amos Oz and the Nobel Prize. Tweeting in Hebrew, she made three points: “1. He’s not dreaming and he’s not trying. He knew long ago that it…
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A Rock Opera About The Holocaust? Yes, Really.
Jeremy Schonfeld didn’t exactly intend to create a multimedia rock opera about the Shoah and the emotional trauma it inflicted across generations. All he wanted to do was write an album in honor of his father, Gustav Schonfeld, a survivor of Auschwitz who passed away in 2011. Yet, according to Schonfeld, the result of this…
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Theater Did Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize Help Him Win Over Marilyn Monroe?
On May 2, 1949, Arthur Miller, then 33, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for “Death of a Salesman.” It was one of several remarkable moments in what was, for Miller, a remarkable year. “Death of a Salesman” swept up most of the season’s available theatrical awards, including the Tony Award for Best Author,…
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Film & TV Leonard Bernstein To Be Portrayed By Jake Gyllenhaal In New Biopic
The year of Leonard Bernstein’s centenary, already widely celebrated, just got even better: Jake Gyllenhaal, your Serious Jewish Actor crush, is going to play Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic. As Deadline reports, Gyllenhaal will produce and star in “The American,” which will begin filming this coming fall from a screenplay by Michael Mitnick, adapted from…
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A Good Man Is Hard To Find (At A Jewish Youth Convention)
When I worked at a Jewish summer camp, I developed a philosophy of dating that I based on a Jewish sports game called gaga. Gaga is a primitive ball-based game that takes place in a pit and involves maneuvering a rubber ball to hit other players in the shins or feet (they’ve never, ever let…
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How The Vilna Troupe Took Yiddish Theater Global
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The world-famous Yiddish theater that eventually became known as the Vilna Troupe had its beginnings under remarkable and completely unexpected circumstances. Before World War I, Vilna had a high-quality Russian theater that attracted a mostly Jewish audience, in part due to the Polish intellectuals’s boycott of Russian…
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‘Mean Girls,’ ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ‘Angels In America’ Lead Tony Nominations
After a particularly boring season on Broadway, there are few surprises among this season’s nominees for the Tony Awards. “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Mean Girls” predictably mopped up nominations, scoring 12 apiece in a season in which new musicals were scarce. Equally predictably, “Escape to Margaritaville,” the Jimmy Buffet musical, won no Tony love; somewhat more…
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Israel’s Security At 70 — Laura E. Adkins In Conversation With Danny Yatom
Laura E. Adkins, deputy opinion editor of the Forward will be appearing in conversation with Major General (ret.) Danny Yatom, the eighth director of the Mossad (1996-98). The event will take place at Bnai Jeshurun on Wednesday May 2. Yatom served as deputy commander of the IDF’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit, military secretary under Defense…
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Theater Is Israel’s Most Famous Playwright Too Political For His Own Country?
In 1985, “Palestinian Girl,” a drama by Joshua Sobol, Israel’s most famous and prolific living playwright, premiered in the Haifa Theater. A story about a love affair between an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman whose relationship is being destroyed by right-wing thugs, the play was controversial, but a huge success. This was a few…
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