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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No Gefilte Here, But There’s Plenty Jewish At The First Academic Conference On Phish
Begining Friday, May 17, Oregon State University will host the first ever academic conference on the jam band Phish, a rock quartet formed at Vermont’s Goddard College and known for its virtuosic improvisation, legendary concerts and devoted following. One of the panels will be devoted exclusively to Phish and the Jews. What’s Jewish about Phish?…
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7 New Books To Read This May
I once read an interview with a book critic who noted that if, as a professional critic, she read five books a week for 50 years, she would only have read 13,000 books by the end of her career. 13,000 isn’t small change. But seeing the number of new and upcoming books that cross my…
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History Of Doris Day
She was the iconic, American girl-next-door. She was wholesome, blonde, perky, Midwestern – a bubbly cheerleader who liked hunky guys. She was white bread with mayonnaise, with perhaps a frisky dollop of mustard. Singer and actress Doris Day – who died on May 13 at age 97 – was a lot of things to a…
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Did Susan Sontag Write Her Ex-Husband’s Most Famous Book?
A new biography of Susan Sontag reveals that the late author’s first published book may well have been released under another name: That of her ex-husband. The sociologist Philip Rieff, whom Sontag married in 1950, launched his career with his 1959 book “Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.” (The book was released in the same…
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Stan Lee May Be Getting A Statue In New York City — Here’s What We Think It Should Look Like
The world today hardly needs a reminder of comic legend Stan Lee’s contribution to our culture. The latest Marvel movie, “Avengers: Endgame,” is currently the second-highest grossing film of all time. A quick trip to Times Square will yield sightings of building-length billboards with Lee’s super-powered creations and about a score of people in bootleg…
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‘Mod Squad’ And ‘Twin Peaks’ Star Peggy Lipton Dies At 72
Peggy Lipton, the star of the late boundary-pushing 1960s series “The Mod Squad” and the 1990s cult hit “Twin Peaks” died Saturday at the age of 72. “We are heartbroken that our beloved mother passed away from cancer today,” her daughters, the actresses Kidada and Rashida Jones said in a statement to the LA Times….
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Why Hummus Is Key To Understanding Jewish Identity
To honor International Hummus Day, we revisit the Sabra Hummus factory, and learn some surprising truths about the origins of the fabled chickpea dish. Three blue cornflowers, stenciled on white ceramic — for the 18 years I spent growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, that was my family’s emblem of hummus. The CorningWare dish, wide…
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Why Is The Cannes Film Festival Honoring This Ally Of French Anti-Semitism?
This year’s Cannes Film Festival, starting May 14, will honor the French film star Alain Delon with a Palme d’honneur prize for acting, a lifetime achievement award that has previously gone to such performers as Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Delon, now 83, has played a hired killer in “The Samurai” (1967) directed…
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The Extraordinary Life Of Leopold Kozlowski, The Last Klezmer Of Galicia
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Leopold Kozlowski, the last active musician to have grown up playing traditional Jewish music in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, died March 12 in Krakow at the age of 100. A world-renowned expert on Jewish music and a teacher who trained generations of klezmer musicians and Yiddish…
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Why The Rock ‘N’ Roll Faithful Are Flocking to The Met
To enter “Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll” — an exhibition currently running at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 1 — you must first walk through a Met gallery devoted to Greek art from the 5th century BC. Jarring as it may be to hear the strains of Chuck Berry’s…
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Nelson Mandela, Iconic Leader for Jews of South Africa — and World
On this day, 25 years ago, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. In honor of that anniversary, we are revisiting Richard Goldstone’s essay that he wrote on the occasion of Mandela’s passing in 2013. Nelson Mandela has become a beloved icon for all of South Africa, and no less for its…
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