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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Books
5 Reasons To Read The Bible — Even Though GQ Says You Shouldn’t
A list of “21 Books You Don’t Have To Read” by GQ seems to exist to give 21 pretentious people the opportunity to describe the specific ways in which they are pretentious. The fact is, there is only one book in the world you absolutely should not read, and that is “Lolita”, a diamond-covered trashcan…
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The Diamond Setter: A Gloriously Immersive Journey Into Modern Israel
The Diamond Setter By Moshe Sakal Translated by Jessica Cohen Other Press, 304 pages, $15.95 If you enjoy richly plotted intergenerational stories inspired by true events, Moshe Sakal’s “The Diamond Setter” offers bountiful pleasures. Born in Tel Aviv and now a resident of Jaffa, Sakal is the scion of a Syrian-Egyptian Jewish family whose colorful…
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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…
The Latest
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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…
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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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