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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Why Israel Is The Cultural Center Of The Jewish World
At the age of seventy, Israel is the cultural center of the Jewish world. Whether in the fields of literature or cinema, theater, dance, or food, Israel can no longer be described as one hub among many, equal in standing to that which continues to be produced in Europe or the United States. Rather, Hebrew…
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Remember That Time Barbra Streisand Chatted With Golda Meir?
Despite recent appearances in duds like “Meet the Fockers” and “Guilt Trip,” Barbra Streisand, who turned 76 on April 24, is a living, breathing legend. Her awards number greater than the population of some small European nations: She’s one of a handful of performers who has won an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony, and an…
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The Secret Jewish History of William Shakespeare
Had William Shakespeare never died, he would be turning 454 years old this month, which would put him in biblical territory for longevity. As it turns out, that’s not necessarily such an unusual place for him to be. While little is known about the historical Shakespeare, there is much to suggest in his work and…
The Latest
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Is The NFL’S Anti-Semitism Hurting Josh Rosen’s Draft Stock?
Ever since I first embraced the mad romance of sports’ fandom as a boy, a romance that I have never outgrown, I just assumed that the reason there weren’t more Jewish professional athletes is that Jews weren’t very good at sports. A genetic thing. Sure, there was an occasional Hank Greenberg or Al Rosen or…
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Before Sondheim And Miranda, There Was Rodgers And Hammerstein
Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution By Todd S. Purdum Henry Holt & Co., 400 pages, $32 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II met cute at Columbia University’s Varsity Show. Hammerstein had helped write the musical variety show. Rodgers’s elder brother, Morty Rodgers, a fraternity pal of Hammerstein’s, introduced the two afterward. Rodgers, not…
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Theater ‘Harry Potter And The Cursed Child’ Is Jewish — And Dark
The amazing, bar-raising production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is unlike anything I’ve seen on Broadway. The $63 million budget, the total renovation of the Lyric Theater into a theme-park-like immersive Potterworld experience, the staging, the two-part/five-hour length (for a mass-market play) – watching it felt like seeing the opening of “Cats” or…
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Film & TV ‘Schindler’s List’ Turns 25 — And Steven Spielberg’s Story Still Speaks To The Masses
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — 1993 was a dramatic year in the memorialization of the Holocaust. In April, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors; 45 million visitors later it is a fixture adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., not only telling the story of the Holocaust but demonstrating the ongoing significance of…
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Why Israel’s National Library Is Such A Treasure Trove For The Jewish People
Did you know that Stefan Zweig’s suicide note is housed in the National Library of Israel? So are Gershom Scholem’s love letters to his first wife, which mention the time he saw the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik at lunch, along with the philosopher Ahad Ha’am. In a recent visit, I held my breath as I…
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Why The Idea Of An Egalitarian Kibbutz Was Always A Myth
The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World By Ran Abramitzky Princeton, $29.95, 360 pages It’s funny to think of kibbutzim as an experiment in radical social equality, since they excluded nonskilled and non-Ashkenazi Israeli Jews. That paradox is not totally lost on Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky, who writes, in the…
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Natalie Portman Just Made A Really Big Mistake
Natalie Portman has announced that she will not travel to Israel to accept the Genesis Prize, informally known as “the Jewish Nobel,” an award in the past given to the likes of artist Anish Kapoor, violinist Itzhak Perlman, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and actor-director Michael Douglas. By taking this public stance at…
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How The 1939 World’s Fair Sold America On Zionism
At the tail end of the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II, the 1939 New York World’s Fair offered weary, anxious Americans an escape from the dismal present into an ecstatic future. Over the fair’s six-month span, 44 million people descended on a former ash dump in Flushing, Queens, to experience…
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