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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Long Before ‘Oklahoma!’ There Was A Real Jewish Oklahoma
If, as Oscar Hammerstein II wrote in “Oklahoma!”, “the farmer and the cowman should be friends,” a hoedown was probably the least likely place for them to voice their grievances. No matter how catchy Richard Rodgers’ melody for the inviting square dance staged by Agnes de Mille, the menacing menfolk most certainly would have required…
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Has Haruki Murakami Written His First Jewish Novel? Kind Of.
Killing Commendatore By Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen Alfred A. Knopf, 704 pages, $30 Around the time of the Anschluss, the 1938 Nazi takeover of Austria, a famous Japanese painter living in Vienna is entangled in an abortive assassination plot. His girlfriend, a resistance member, is captured, tortured and killed by…
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Film & TV ‘The Eugenics Crusade’ On PBS Sheds Light On An Ugly American Phenomenon
For most Americans, eugenics exists in the cobwebs of history. It’s a musty, bogus relic now universally dismissed by the scientific community as a racist doctrine that misunderstands sociological factors. But watching the documentary “The Eugenics Crusade,” which premieres on PBS October 16 at 8:00 PM, one finds eerie echoes of the current discourse around…
The Latest
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Netflix’s ‘Big Mouth’ Is Boldly Jewish
Netflix’s “Big Mouth” is not for everyone. Though its charming animation and middle-school aged characters suggest something for the K-12 set, its excessively filthy humor makes it inappropriate for a large chunk of that demographic. By the same token, its extreme ribaldry, often paired with useful but sometimes didactic lessons about puberty, contraception and body…
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Film & TV EXCLUSIVE: The Improv King Of America
Imagine Ilsa refusing to leave Rick in “Casablanca.” Or if, in “When Harry Met Sally,” after Sally faked her orgasm, the lady in the diner had left in disgust instead of saying, “I’ll have what she’s having.” Imagine if, in “Being There,” one of Ben’s friends sees through the error and tells everyone that Chance…
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Film & TV Jerome Robbins Was The Quintessential Jewish American Genius
On May 6, 1953, Jerome Robbins was front-page news in the Forward for an act that would haunt him for the rest of his life. An above-the-fold headline — published next to an unrelated photo of a handsome young harbor boss named Francis Kelly, who appeared to be wearing lipstick — read “Acclaimed Dancer Gives…
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On The Books: 5 Questions For Stephen Shepard, Author Of ‘A Literary Journey To Jewish Identity’
Following a long career as a writer and editor with Newsweek and Businessweek and a storied tenure as the Founding Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, Stephen Shepard has been spending his retirement revisiting the books of his youth. The result of these re-readings is a book…
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Could Jerry Lewis Have Become The Jewish Andy Warhol?
Jerry Lewis tasted celluloid on at least one occasion. Not metaphorically, or at least not entirely so. In his slender opus, “The Total Filmmaker,” Lewis writes, “I have a confession. Crazy. I have perched in a cutting room and licked emulsion. Maybe I thought more of me would get on to that film. I don’t…
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They Can Dogwhistle Soros, But They’re Reckoning Without Popper
‘Lou Dobbs, the great Lou Dobbs,” President Donald Trump called him at his Council Bluffs rally on Tuesday, going on to namecheck seven more of his “great friends” on Fox News. It was to Dobbs that Texan congressman Louie Gohmert said that Democrats “might as well raise their forearm and raise their hands and yell,…
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Don’t Compare Stephen Miller To Pig-Pen!
In an October 10 article in the Hollywood Reporter, Stephen Miller’s former third-grade teacher from Franklin Elementary School compared Trump’s Senior Advisor to the beloved “Peanuts” character Pig-Pen. How dare she? “Do you remember that character in ‘Peanuts,’ the one called Pig Pen (sic), with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him?” Miller’s…
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Music A Yearlong Celebration Of Kurt Weill Is Off To An Operatic Start
Responding to the current debate over immigration policy inside the nearby Beltway, the University of Maryland has declared a Year of Immigration. Part of the yearlong initiative is the University’s first Kurt Weill Festival, which kicked off October 6 with the German-born composer’s 1937 opera-oratorio “The Road of Promise.” “The reason why we’re studying Kurt…
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