Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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Theater Jason Alexander lives out a lifelong dream, playing Tevye in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
'I wanted to do a piece that is proudly Semitic' said the Tony winner and ‘Seinfeld' star
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When Oprah Met Rosie O’Donnell At ‘Indecent’
The current buzz about Rosie O’Donnell’s Twitter feed (yes, really) is mostly centered on the fact that President Trump revived one of her old tweets to throw some unabashedly petty shade at James Comey, the FBI Director he abruptly — and with confused reasoning — fired on Tuesday. We finally agree on something Rosie. https://t.co/BSP5F3PgbZ…
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Irving Berlin Is 129 Today — This Is His Most American Song
I’ve always been dubious of the idea of “American Culture.” America, being, since its inception, a land of immigrants constantly in demographic and ethnic flux. And this is a good thing, indeed, the idea of a country founded upon legal and philosophical principles, as opposed to ethnic or linguistic concerns, is the fundamental promise of…
The Latest
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20 Years Ago, Deep Blue Beat Garry Kasparov — And Changed The World
On May 11, 1997, something utterly unexpected happened to then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov: He conceded defeat in the last of six chess games with the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, losing the match. It wasn’t the first time Kasparov had faced off with a machine. In 1985, he beat 32 computerized opponents at the same…
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Anti-Semitism Goes Missing In Julian Assange Doc
Look at how they look at him, Julian Assange’s cadre of cyber vigilantes. In a private home in Norfolk, in livery cabs with Daniel Ellsberg in the passenger seat, in windowless rooms in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, members of Assange’s Wikileaks organization fawn over him and defer to him, give him the floor first…
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Rama Burshtein Has A Fundamental Belief In Marriage
In “The Wedding Plan,” writer-director Rama Burshtein’s follow-up to her debut feature “Fill The Void,” a Hasidic Jewish woman named Micha gives herself less than a month to find true love, after which she plans to give up on marriage. As with her previous film, Burshtein focuses on the topic of marriage among the Haredi…
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Is ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Anti-Feminist?
Hulu’s television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” has gained general acclaim as a feminist manifesto for our times. But critic and novelist Francine Prose isn’t buying it. Writing in The New York Review of Books last week, Prose wrote that the show, which explores a fictionalized future United States in which…
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The Velvet Underground & Nico: A (Belated) 50th Anniversary Reading List
I remember the first time I ever really listened to Lou Reed. I was around 12 years old and I had recently come into possession of one of the old record players collecting dust at my grandmother’s house. I owned (really, stole from my dad) three records – “Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderly,” “Led Zeppelin II,”…
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Israel’s Book Fair Cuts Are Devastating To Readers
Forty communities in Israel, all located far away from major cities, will not be participating in this year’s Shavua HaSefer, or “Week of the Book” program due to funding cuts — and the news has prompted an outcry from writers and community leaders who say this will be devastating to readers. Shavua HaSefer, a program…
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How Does Ben Platt Handle Pressure Of ‘Dear Evan Hansen’? Ask His Rabbi
At 23, Ben Platt is a Broadway star, a member of Time’s 2017 list of the world’s 100 Most Influential People, and generally expected to win a 2017 Tony Award. The son of theater and film producer Marc Platt, the actor has been immersed in musical theater effectively since birth, but his big break has…
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New Novel Will Imagine Hillary Rodham Without Bill Clinton
Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld has rewritten Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and the life of former first lady Laura Bush. Now, she has a new subject: Hillary Rodham Clinton. As part of a three-book deal with Random House, Sittenfeld, who is half-Jewish, will write a novel imagining what the former Secretary of State, senator, and first…
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Art Even In World’s Smallest Jerusalem, Israelis Can’t Parallel Park
On the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, a massive model railroad tribute in New York City’s Times Square displays the religious, archaeological and architectural diversity of Israel’s capital – while also playfully pointing out that many Israelis still drive like schmucks. At Gulliver’s Gate, a new Manhattan tourist attraction that officially opened on…
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FIRST PERSON As a rabbi, he helped others mourn. So why wouldn’t his daughter say kaddish for him?
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