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
Philip Glass, ‘Hamilton’ To Receive Kennedy Center Honors
The selections for this year’s Kennedy Center Honors were announced this morning and, as ever, they’re a who’s who of people it’s hard to imagine otherwise interacting. American Jewish composer Philip Glass is receiving the famous rainbow-banded medal, awarded annually to five artists whose talents have helped shape American culture. Glass is joined in the…
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Why The Nazis Banned This Strauss Opera — Even Though He Collaborated
The composer Richard Strauss has a complicated legacy. Beginning in 1933, Strauss served as the President of the Reichsmusikkammer, the Nazi Reich’s Chamber of Music, a damning collaboration with the regime. But in 2014, prompted by celebrations of Strauss’s 150th birthday, many music scholars took to editorial pages, to reconsider the extent of the artist’s…
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Film & TV A Love Letter To Max Blecher, Scars And All
Pott’s disease is a form of tuberculosis that bypasses the lungs and takes up residency in the bones, particularly the vertebrae. It is this macabre ailment that afflicts Emmanuel, the protagonist of Romanian director Radu Jude’s new film “Scarred Hearts,” playing at Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives starting July 27. By the time the movie begins,…
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Music Barry Goldberg: Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Most Underrated Jew
“Jewish soul brother” is a term Barry Goldberg likes to use when praising his favorite musical tribesmen, and it certainly applies to him, as well. Over the course of his six-decades-and-counting career, the keyboardist, songwriter and producer has had enough musical adventures for three lifetimes, including serving as Bob Dylan’s piano man at the 1965…
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Life, Death And Wrestling With Delacroix’s Angel In Paris
‘You must see the garden,” said the guard, in French, pointing to a door in the Delacroix Museum that my daughter and I hadn’t noticed. It led outside and down two sets of stairs to an exquisite courtyard, a silent oasis below the studio where Eugène Delacroix lived while he struggled to finish his last…
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Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje Longlisted For Man Booker Prize
Rachel Kushner, Sally Rooney and Richard Powers are among the authors longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. The prize, given annually, will be awarded on October 16, following the announcement of a shortlist on September 20. Originally restricted to fiction from Commonwealth countries and Ireland, the prize recently attracted controversy after, starting in 2014,…
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Behold The Jewish Treasures Of The Library Of Congress
I saw censor’s marks for the first time at the Library of Congress, home to a priceless collection of Hebrew books. I opened a 1486 edition of the machzor, a High Holidays prayer book labeled Minhag Roma, or Roman rite — printed in Italy, bound in marbled boards and featuring leather corners — and gasped…
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Film & TV The Old Schtick Still Works For Mel Brooks
At 92, Mel Brooks is a lot of things: A Kennedy Center award recipient, a titan of both stage and screen even a vampire grandfather in the recently-released “Hotel Transylvania 3,” but for all these distinctions he reduces himself to one thing. “I’m just a Jew comic,” he tells David Denby in a new profile…
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Is It Kosher For A Jew To Love Gospel Music?
Synagogue was never a particularly religious place for me. The songs, prayers and rituals I observed and participated in at my hometown Conservative synagogue just never really did it for me. By “it,” I mean the feeling that I always sensed I was supposed have inside that building with the stained-glass windows, wood-backed pews and…
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Thou Shalt Not Date A Trump Supporter (Or Lie With One)
It all started, as it so often does for me, with the cutest dog I had ever seen. We were playing with the puppy in his family’s sprawling uptown apartment, sipping something expensive that had been decanted into a crystal bottle. Then we were kissing in an armchair. Then he was leading me to his…
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Theater Complicity In Nazi Germany — And Here
The word “complicit” has become so popular in the first years of the Trump administration that it can register as an empty gesture at a damning concept. Your tax dollars go to separating children from their parents at the border; you are complicit, and what does that mean? How could you change it? You, personally,…
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Fast Forward Why some Satmar Hasidic leaders endorsed Zohran Mamdani as mayor, stunning many Jewish voters
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News How Mamdani became New York’s next mayor, with Jews divided between fierce opposition and fiery support
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Culture Mamdani quoted Eugene Debs in his victory speech — there’s a long Jewish history there
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Fast Forward Cornell inks $60M deal with Trump administration to resolve antisemitism claims
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Books How the Yonkers-born son of Jewish immigrants became the king of American comedy
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Fast Forward BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage
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