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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Music
Barbra Streisand’s Latest Is Surprisingly Political (And Astonishingly Good)
Ever wonder what’s on Barbra Streisand’s mind these days? Well, wonder no more. This past Friday, Streisand released a brand-new album, the aptly titled “Walls,” which kicks off with a new song called “What’s on My Mind.” “What happened to just being kind? That’s what’s on my mind,” Streisand tells us, on one of the…
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Meticulous In Literature, Messy In Life — The Real Saul Bellow
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 By Zachary Leader Knopf, 784 pp, $40 By Steven G. Kellman In 1998, when the Modern Library polled readers to determine the 100 best novels in English, two books by Saul Bellow — “Henderson the Rain King” and “The Adventures of Augie March” — made the…
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Why Pittsburgh Paper’s ‘Kaddish’ Headline Is So Meaningful
The course of history occasionally brings a front page that proves impossible to forget. The Chicago Tribune’s premature, incorrect declaration “Dewey Defeats Truman” on November 3, 1948; The New York Times’s “U.S. Attacked” headline on September 12, 2001; the ubiquitous “Nixon Resigns” headlines on August 9, 1974. For many, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s front page of…
The Latest
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Squirrel Hill’s Sophie Masloff Was Pittsburgh’s First Female Jewish Mayor
Pittsburgh’s Jewish history is receiving renewed attention in the wake of the October 28 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. But while we mourn, we also acknowledge that there is much to celebrate about the community’s past. Did you know, for instance, that the first female Mayor of Pittsburgh was also Jewish?* Sophie Masloff,…
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The Secret Jewish History Of Queen
Had things gone the way they were originally supposed to, the lead role of Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody” – the biopic about the rock group Queen that opens on Friday, November 2 – would have been played by Sacha Baron Cohen instead of Rami Malek. That’s right: Instead of the Los Angeles-born son of…
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At The Met, A Kleptomaniac To Dye For
Competing versions of the same story can draw one’s attention to the moments of divergence, like to a distinguishing mark or tic. In this way, it seems notable that the eponymous protagonist of Nico Muhly’s new opera “Marnie,” adapted from the 1961 Winston Graham novel that also inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film of the same…
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Music Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood On The Tracks’ Was Pretty Jewish Behind The Scenes
More like “Tangled Up in Jew.” In an October 31, 2018 piece for the New Yorker music journalist Jeff Slate revealed the early recording history of Bob Dylan’s 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks” and its little known Jewish connections. Slate, who wrote the liner notes for “More Blood, More Tracks,” the latest in Dylan’s…
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Will The Pittsburgh Bloodbath Forge A Bond Between American Jews And Muslims?
Within hours of the October 27 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Muslim-American activists sprang into action. Tarek El-Messidi, founding director of the faith-based nonprofit Celebrate Mercy launched a “Muslims Unite for Pittsburgh Synagogue” campaign on LaunchGood, a Muslim fundraising website, with the goal of providing for the short-term needs of…
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AUDIO: Gary Shteyngart, Are Jews White?
Ten years ago I interviewed Gary Shteyngart for a profile in Zeek. At the time his hair was brown and mine covered my head. In the time since then he has continued to put out books at a steady rate of one every three or four years. His earlier novels (“Absurdistan” and “The Russian Debutante’s…
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How A Forverts Video Reunited Two Old Friends
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In an apartment somewhere in the metropolis of New York City, the distinguished composer Gershon Kingsley was sitting by his archive when he found sheet music for a composition he had created years ago for the dancer Naomi Leaf Halpern, and he realized that it had been…
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Why Trump’s Callous Call To End Birthright Citizenship Is A Jewish Issue
President Trump’s calls to strip American-born citizens of their citizenship should chill all Americans, but it is especially disturbing to anyone with knowledge of Jewish history. Citizenship is a profoundly Jewish issue. In the Middle Ages, many Jews were simply not citizens of their countries. “In much of Europe during the Middle Ages, Jews were…
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