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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Like Philip Roth, But Feminist: Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Debut Novel
On page 266 of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” I was filled with sadness, immediately and brutally, as if I had been injected with it. There is nothing particularly sad about page 266; the New York Times Magazine staff writer’s debut novel, while often funny, is pervasively sad, in an intimate, unavoidable way. But…
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For Pauline Kael, Who Reinvented Film Criticism, On Her Hundredth Birthday
In a blistering essay in a 1980 edition of the New York Review Of Books, Renata Adler accused New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael of doing lasting damage to the critical enterprise. Critiquing Kael’s collection “When The Lights Go Down,” Adler wrote that the book revealed the pitfalls of the critic-in-residence post. By giving Kael…
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Bob Dylan Musical ‘Girl From The North Country’ Set For Broadway Run
The music of Bob Dylan is coming to Broadway yet again — but not in the way one might expect. While previous efforts to plop Dylan’s music on the Great White Way include Twyla Tharp’s disastrous 2006 dance piece “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and Archibald MacLeish’s 1971 play, “Scratch,” for which the two poets…
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How The War Against Sexual Harassment Was Won
Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment By Linda Hirshman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 316 pages, $27 It’s hard to write history while it’s happening. One pitfall is the problem of assessing just how powerful a movement or trend really is. To wit: Is the current #MeToo furor the harbinger of a social revolution?…
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WATCH: The Musical Legacy Of Velvel Pasternak
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s no exaggeration to say that the renaissance of traditional Eastern-European Jewish music of the 1970s and 1980s would have never occurred without the work of the ethnomusicologist and musician Velvel Pasternak, who died on June 11th. The dozens of books of Jewish music released by his…
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Director Of Berlin’s Jewish Museum Resigns After BDS Controversy
Peter Schäfer, the embattled director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum resigned on June 14 following fresh controversy surrounding his involvement in the boycott, divestment and sanctions dialogue, a source of growing contention in Germany. Schäfer, a former Princeton professor of Judaic Studies who is not Jewish, was questioned for his leadership in past months. But his…
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My Bubbe, The Bull And The Kabbalah Of Catching A Foul Ball
It’s a weird thing to admit, perhaps, but my most vivid memory of my first major league baseball game involves foul balls. Sure, I still remember how awestruck I was by the hulking, battleship-like presence of Detroit’s old Tiger Stadium, and by how lush and lurid the green of the field appeared in contrast with…
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Leonard Cohen’s Letters To His Muse Snagged $876,000 At Christie’s
Leonard Cohen’s letters, alongside other artifacts belonging to the late poet and songwriter’s one-time muse and lover Marianne Ihlen, have sold for $876,000 in an auction by Christies. Many of the items exceeded their initial asking prices. Among the auctioned items was a bronze bell that once adorned the wall of Cohen and Ihlen’s home…
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RBG Appears At Broadway Play About The Constitution, Drawing Tears And Cheers
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended a Saturday evening performance of Heidi Schreck’s “What The Constitution Means to Me” this weekend, prompting tears from the cast and a mid-show standing ovation from the audience. Ginsburg is perhaps known more for her love of opera than for plays, but the concern of Schreck’s Pulitzer-nominated work…
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Music Woody Guthrie’s Jewish Soul And The Tale Of A Tulsa Tallis
In the summer of 2014, on the strength of a BMI-Woody Guthrie Fellowship, I spent a glorious few weeks researching in the archives in the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The materials I found there not only fed into the writing of two books on Guthrie, but they also revealed some of the least…
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Jim Dine On His Jewish Fate And The Fate Of The Jews
The American artist Jim Dine, who will be 84 on June 16, has just produced a new book, [“Jewish Fate” (Steidl Publishers)](Steidl Publishers ““Jewish Fate” (Steidl Publishers)”) an evocation in free verse and imagery of his boyhood, working in the Cincinnati hardware store of his grandfather, Morris Cohen. Emerging from the generation of U.S. pop…
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