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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Film & TV
Matthew Weiner Doesn’t Remember Misconduct With ‘Mad Men’ Writer
Matthew Weiner was reflecting on his management style this Yom Kippur, but continues to deny charges of misconduct involving a female employee. In a Vanity Fair profile released in advance of the “Mad Men” creator’s new Amazon series, “The Romanoffs,” Joy Press, the piece’s writer, noted that Weiner appeared “palpably nervous, his conversation a tangle…
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Why Transliteration Matters
As defined by Merriam-Webster’s, “transliteration” means “to represent or spell in the characters of another alphabet.” And, one unexpected aspect of writing about language is learning how many people around the world turn out to be passionately concerned with transliteration. For example, I have received numerous missives on the spelling of mamaloshn, or “mother tongue”…
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How A Lost 1955 Bar Mitzvah Album And Its Owner Were Reunited
On Thursday, September 20, 2018 at the Jewel-Osco supermarket in Chicago, Jenni Spinner, a freelance writer and editor, found a 1955 Bar Mitzvah album on top of a stack of Lagunitas IPA 12 packs in the liquor department. What such an interesting personal item was doing there we still don’t know, but thanks to some…
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A Stand-Up Tragedy From The Mind Of David Grossman
After two hours and 40 minutes of brutal self-flagellation, Dov Greenstein stumbled exhaustedly around a raised wooden stage strewn with flowers: his shirt torn, his pants ripped, his face battered and painted with blood. “I’m a little tired now,” he said, exhaling as the lights dimmed and the stage faded to black at the end…
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Film & TV From An Exiled Filmmaker, A Rock ‘N’ Roll Parable
“I’ve lived for eight months as if on the other side of the mirror,” an exasperated Kirill Serebrennikov told a judge in Moscow on April 18 of this year. It was the Russian-Jewish director’s most recent day in court since being placed under house arrest last August on corruption charges that are widely considered to…
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October 3: Manhattan: Judy Gold Honors Sharp-Witted Joan Rivers
Joan Rivers, known for her sharp tongue and self-deprecating humor, was a female pioneer in the field of American comedy. Buy tickets here. Join comedian Judy Gold and Rivers’s niece Caroline Waxler for night full of controversial humor à la Rivers on October 3 at the American Jewish Historical Society in Manhattan. Beginning at 7…
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Sartre, The Kavanaugh Hearings And The Politics Of ‘Bad Faith’
Bad faith is very much in the news. As the media relentlessly remind us, Republicans are tirelessly accusing Democrats of bad faith, while Democrats relentlessly blast Republicans for the same sin. But Jean-Paul Sartre, the thinker who immortalized the phrase, would argue that what he called “mauvaise foi” is not only quite different, but it…
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‘A Good Name’: What Jewish Law Says About Crimes Committed In Youth
On Thursday, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified that President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, tried to rape her in 1982. Her testimony, some of which has been public for weeks, sparked a vociferous debate about sexual assault. Democrats, who opposed Kavanaugh from the get-go, see in the accusation a tarnished name that would impede…
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Art Houdini’s Astounding Jewish History Revealed!
A thrilling new exhibition about Harry Houdini pulls off an elaborate trick of its own. “Inescapable: The Life and Legacy of Harry Houdini,” at the Jewish Museum of Maryland through January 2019, manages to make the mythical magician’s story feel fresh — an achievement that’s almost as hard as making an elephant disappear, which Houdini…
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A Life Of Hannah Arendt In All Its Graphic Detail
The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt By Ken Krimstein Bloomsbury, 232 pages, $28 In “The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, a Tyranny of Truth,” a graphic biography, Ken Krimstein, a New Yorker cartoonist who teaches at DePaul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts Arendt in a way no other book…
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Theater ‘Hoaxocaust’ Is As Controversial As It Sounds
Barry Levey wants a Jewish identity free of victimhood. Confronting his brother’s interfaith marriage, his mother’s objection to the union and his LatinX boyfriend’s insistence that the Jewish story is no longer one of persecution, he begins to wonder: What would it be like if the Holocaust never happened? “Imagine how much easier life would…
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