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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Film & TV
Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ Is 40. Can We Still Admire It In 2019?
When Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn began their relationship, she was a 21-year-old college freshman and the adopted daughter of Allen’s longtime partner, Mia Farrow. He was 56 and had already directed “Manhattan.” Their nearly three-decade-long romantic involvement has made the film, which turns 40 on April 25 and involves a love affair between 42-year-old…
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‘Children Of A Lesser God’ Playwright Mark Medoff Is Dead At 79
“Children of a Lesser God” playwright Mark Medoff, whose work elevated deaf actors on stage and screen, died April 23 at the age of 79. Medoff had been battling cancer and passed away in hospice care, Las Cruces Sun News reported. Medoff was born to Jewish parents in Mount Carmel, Illinois on March 18, 1940….
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Cystic Fibrosis Took Her Life. In Her Writing, She Left An Extraordinary Gift.
Mallory Smith’s memoir “Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life” may prove the most difficult book you’ll ever read. Because you know the ending. Smith was just three years old when she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a progressive lung disease for which there is no cure. A defective gene causes a buildup of mucus…
The Latest
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Oliver Sacks’s Partner On Readying The Author’s Final Book
Oliver Sacks was not a writer who mystified his process, writing quite a bit about how his work came together in books like “On the Move.” But what was it like to edit the neurologist and author? And how, now that he’s passed, did his collaborators put together a new book of his essays? Bill…
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What’s An Ex-CIA Leader Doing On ‘Game Of Thrones’?
Last night’s “Game of Thrones,” the second installment of the hit HBO show’s six-episode final season, saw the ensemble awaiting a climactic siege on the northern holdfast of Winterfell. But little did the keepers of the castle know, as they planted bulwarks and fretted about tactics, that an expert on matters of national security was…
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At Henry Street, The Fight For Immigrant Rights Endures
“Scorn of the immigrant is not peculiar to our generation,” the progressive reformer and nurse Lillian Wald wrote in “The House on Henry Street,” the memoir she wrote in 1915. That was 22 years after she had traded in her plan to become a doctor for a life spent helping the polyglot residents of the…
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Jerome Charyn, The Half-Wild Novelist
Jerome Charyn lives in a well-preserved pocket of old New York. Within a block of his home on West 12th Street, near where the grid’s order gives way to angled avenues, is a park that dates back to the early 19th century; a grubby magazine stand; a handful of bodegas; a regularly-location-scouted luncheonette as seen…
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Susan Klebold Doesn’t Believe God Is Watching Over Her Family Anymore
In the days after Dylan Klebold along with Eric Harris shot and killed 12 students and one teacher and then himself at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, his mother, Sue Klebold, remembered a kind of “religious warfare” in the community of Littleton, Colorado. The notion that she hadn’t raised her son to be…
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My Journey With The Szyk Haggadah
I first met Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) and discovered his Haggadah in 1975. In search of a gift for each member of my wedding party, I wandered into Bloch’s Judaica bookstore on Manhattan’s West Side and purchased several copies of the blue velvet-covered 1956 first Israeli edition of the Szyk Haggadah. Thus was kindled my intimate…
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Theater Why The Edelweiss Is Not A Nazi Anthem
I won’t waste any time. “Edelweiss,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein song, penned for their 1959 musical “The Sound of Music,” that played at the White House before a press conference on the day the Mueller report was unsealed, is not a Nazi anthem. In the show and film, it’s sung in a moment of defiance…
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Theater Is Orpheus And Eurydice A Myth About Political Power? In ‘Hadestown,’ Absolutely.
Editor’s note: On April 30 ‘Hadestown’ was nominated for 14 Tony Awards, the highest number of any eligible Broadway show. Orpheus and Eurydice: You know the story. They fall in love, Eurydice dies, and Orpheus, a musician of astonishing talent, follows her to the underworld, hoping to rescue her. His music so moves Hades, god…
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