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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NBC Orders “Law & Order: Hate Crimes”
For all its successes, there are a couple “Law & Order” variations that have died on the vine. Who could forget — or rather, who can remember — the single season clunkers “Law & Order: LA” and “Law & Order: Trial By Jury?” Now, Variety reports, a new riff on the old procedural formula is…
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How I Grew Up With ‘Fiddler On The Roof’
“They’re doing ‘Fiddler’ in Yiddish,” a friend recently told my husband and me. “You both speak it, right?” “Only what I picked up from my parents,” I said. “Household Yiddish,” Martin joked. “We know the words for complaining.” “There are subtitles,” she said, offering to get tickets for us to join her and her husband….
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7 Questions For Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari is concerned about our bad decisions. Whereas the Oxford-educated Israeli historian and academic’s past work examined the far-flung past and the way-off future, his third book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (Spiegel & Grau), brings his insights to the here-and-now into a call to action. Harari believes that unless we heed…
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Q & A: Norm Eisen Is Leading The Legal Charge Against Trump —And Bringing Prague’s 20th-Century To Life
Among the many oddities of the President Trump years is the extent to which relatively obscure government officials — the kind who, in any other administration, would barely register in the public consciousness — have become subjects of fascination. Hubbubs have been made over the many civil servants who have conscientiously resigned, often through the…
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Nothing Succeeds Like Gary Shteyngart’s ‘Success’
Lake Success: A Novel Gary Shteyngart Random House, 352 pages, $28 Barry Cohen is a hero for our time. The protagonist of Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, “Lake Success,” he is master of the universe, or at least of Wall Street, although really, he is waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is 2016, and…
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Put Aside The Politics In ‘Operation Finale’ — Is It Any Good As A Film?
In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” During his 1961 trial in Israel, Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Nazi’s Final Solution, presented himself as a bureaucrat, a man who had just followed orders. “Operation Finale,” Chris Weitz’s limp dramatization of Eichmann’s 1960 abduction by the Mossad in…
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Film & TV ‘Schindler’s List’ Will Return To Theaters This December
This December, Universal Pictures will re-release “Schindler’s List” on the occasion of the Oscar-winning film’s 25th anniversary. As Slate reports, the Holocaust drama that earned Steven Spielberg his first Academy Award for Best Director will return to theaters on December 7. The film, about the German industrialist Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson, who was nominated for…
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Orson Welles’s Last Movie Will Finally Debut, Decades After His Death — And Here’s The Trailer
The cinematic powers that be have blessed us: Behold the first trailer for a new Orson Welles film. You read that right. Though the auteur behind “Citizen Kane” has been dead for over three decades, a troupe of strivers, among them the film’s co-star Peter Bogdanovich — himself a celebrated director — have managed to…
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The Venice International Film Festival Opens Tonight. Here’s What To Expect.
The Venice International Film Festival starts today and runs through September 8. And of course, Jewish directors are bringing their A-game. In competition for the famous Golden Lion award are three pictures by already-celebrated Jewish auteurs. Joel and Ethan Coen are presenting “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” a Netflix-produced Western anthology starring Tim Blake Nelson…
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Eichmann’s Capture Created Dangerous Myths. ‘Operation Finale’ Makes Them Worse.
In a telling scene in “Operation Finale” — the new blockbuster dramatization of Israel’s 1960 capture of Nazi architect of the Final Solution Adolf Eichmann — Mossad operatives are in a bar, drinking, smoking and looking somber. The group has a resident hothead, a staple of the espionage genre, who insists that each team member…
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Art A Henry Moore Sketch Is The Latest Find In The Gurlitt Hoard
A drawing by the British sculptor Henry Moore, estimated to be worth over $90,000, has been discovered in the most notorious hoard of Nazi-looted art found this century. As The Guardian reports, Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern asked the BBC program “Fact or Fortune” to determine the origins and authenticity of the watercolor sketch, which depicts several…
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