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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Theater
Purim in Paris: Rachel Félix and the Paradox of French Anti-Semitism
Paris is crammed with sites of Jewish interest. While some are obvious — the shops on the Rue des Rosiers or the Holocaust memorial at Drancy — others come as more of a surprise. The Comédie-Française belongs to this latter group. The nation’s oldest state theater, founded in the 17th century under the aegis of…
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The Case For A Queen Esther Disney Film
With the acquisition of Lucasfilm, the multi-billion dollar handshake that forged the Marvel-Disney partnership and an incipient deal with Fox, Mickey Mouse owns almost every brand worth having. This mass cultural monopolization has its benefits. For the first time in anyone’s lifetime a film could now, without breach of current copyright law, show stormtroopers from…
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No One Asked, But Here’s David Mamet’s Take On The Admissions Scandal Anyway
Like his characters, David Mamet lacks a filter. The celebrated playwright feels the near-constant urge to opine on issues that don’t require his input. Race relations. “Brain-Dead Liberals” . Sexual abuse in Hollywood. Now Mamet is tackling the scandal du jour: A $25 million college admissions bribery plot uncovered by the FBI and revealed in…
The Latest
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Theater The Drama Of The Admissions Scandal Gets Its Time On Stage In ‘Admissions’
Yesterday, during rehearsals for Theater Wit’s production of Joshua Harmon’s “Admissions,” a drama about parents’ bullheaded efforts to get their child into his college of choice, the news broke among the cast and creative team. A wide-ranging sting operation conducted by federal authorities led to the indictment of 50 people —- including the actresses Felicity…
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Trump Doesn’t Want Einstein As His Pilot — Here’s Why
In his latest nonsensical Twitter tirade, Trump lamented how complicated airplane design is getting. Apropos of nothing, the Leader of the Free World spewed the following forth onto the internet: Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time…
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Meet The Chicago Journalism Professor Helping Dreamers Tell Their Stories Through Podcasting
Edie Rubinowitz had seen it in her office hours for the last two years. “Dreamers — or undocumented DACA recipients — had a kind of horrible alienation,” Rubinowitz, the Acting Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Theatre at Northeastern Illinois University told the Forward. “They’d say ‘I shouldn’t be in…
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Meet America’s Most Outspoken Film Critic — On Elaine May, Steven Spielberg & Yiddishkeit
At 75, one of America’s most influential film critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum, is being celebrated with a collection of his articles from University of Illinois Press and with a second volume planned for May. His international reputation is based on previous books on political films, the vagaries of film culture, the cinema of Orson Welles, the…
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Is Captain Marvel A Zionist Superhero?
Captain Marvel is the first female lead of a Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Her movie is the first female-fronted film to break $400 million in its opening weekend. Is she also the first Zionist superhero of the MCU? There’s no real way to make this argument without spoiling one of the major reveals of “Captain…
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Ilya Kaminsky: A Poet At The Height Of His Powers, Questioning Everything
Deaf Republic: Poems By Ilya Kaminsky Graywolf Press, $16, 80 pages The poetry world has been waiting for Ilya Kaminsky’s new collection for fifteen years — but this is the book that will bring him wide readership outside of the small yet passionate continent of poetry readers. This is the book that will let readers…
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A Collegial Interrogation Of Debut Novelist Andrew Ridker
Andrew Ridker was writing about Jewish novelists before he became one. I know this because we were college classmates, and I read a fair portion of Andrew’s thesis on Philip Roth. Before the close reading of “American Pastoral,” I read some of Andrew’s early poetry — more on that, later — and at least one…
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A Thrilling Israeli Spy Story, But Is It Accurate? Or Moral?
Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel By Matti Friedman Algonquin Books, 272 pages, $26.95 It is entertaining to learn that in Beirut in 1947, Jewish intelligence agents detonated a mine attached to the Aviso Grille, which was once Hitler’s personal yacht. In his new history, “Spies of No Country: Secret…
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