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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How My Daughter’s Bat Mitzvah Almost Didn’t Happen
Our daughter stood on the bimah facing the congregation, cradling a Torah nearly half her size. She chanted the Shema, loud and strong, filling the airy synagogue. Her song stirred reflections on assimilation and annihilation, the twin threats to Judaism of the long 20th century, and on the narrow and winding path my family traveled…
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25 Years Later, ‘Angels In America’ Returns To London
Tony Kushner’s generation-defining two-part play “Angels in America” premiered in San Francisco in 1991, but to many, its first definitive production was at London’s National Theatre in 1992. The year-long run of “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” — soon to be followed by part 2, “Angels in America: Perestroika” — cemented the play’s Broadway prospects,…
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More Than 120 Years Later, ‘Dreyfus Affair’ Still Resonates
The infamous story of the 1894 conspiracy against French Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason is being dramatized at Brooklyn’s BAM Fisher in a multi-media production, “The Dreyfus Affair,” based on texts and music from that period. The performance by The Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) includes excerpts from the politically charged opera “La…
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When Smart Rabbis Make Dumb Videos We Must Demand Better
Recently, there’s been a trend to act as if the rising anti-Semitism across the Western world sprang from nothing. Not that there are no reasons behind the rise, but simply that before the resurgence of far right movements, anti-Semitism was simply not around in any meaningful capacity. We know this, of course, to be false….
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Jane Jacobs’s Epic Battle With Robert Moses Takes To Times Square Billboards
In the 20th century, New York City was shaped by city planner Robert Moses, activist Jane Jacobs, and their notorious battles. Now the city’s most famous district, Times Square, will pay homage to the impact of their clashes. As DNA Info reports, a background animation to the opera “A Marvelous Order,” which chronicles the conflict,…
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See Nuremberg’s Last Living Prosecutor — And More To Read, Watch And Do This Weekend
The last living prosecutor to assist in the Nuremberg trials, a set of military tribunals that brought Nazi leaders to justice, learned an important lesson from the work: “War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people.” Ben Ferencz told that to Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes,” which will air an interview with Ferencz this Sunday….
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Vladimir Putin Watched ‘Dr. Strangelove’ With Oliver Stone
If you were given exclusive access to Russian president Vladimir Putin, how would you make use of that time? Filmmaker Oliver Stone had an interesting answer to that question: Show him Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.” Yes, really. As The Washington Post reported, Stone, interviewing Putin for the upcoming Showtime feature “The Putin Interviews,” showed the…
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How Philippe Halsman Reinvented The Portrait
I’ve never truly believed the idea that portrait photography can tell us a clear truth about its subject. When we look at a portrait of Samuel Beckett, for instance, we might read a certain depth of life, and a certain hawk-like incisiveness, into the nooks and crannies of his face. But despite the expressiveness of…
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Jean Stein, Best-Selling Oral Historian, Dies In Apparent Suicide
Jean Stein, a best-selling author of oral histories, passed away on Sunday, April 30. As The Guardian reported, Stein apparently jumped to her death from the 15th floor of a Manhattan high-rise. She was 83 years old. Stein’s books included “Edie: An American Girl,” in which she brought together the voices of Edie Sedgwick’s friends,…
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In The AIDS Pandemic, William Hoffman Saw Parallels To The Holocaust
The American playwright and editor William Moses Hoffman, who died on April 29 at age 78, expressed his Judaism through dramatizations of the tragic AIDS pandemic. As Jonathan Friedman’s “Rainbow Jews: Jewish and Gay Identity in the Performing Arts” notes, “Among the first dramatists to write plays about AIDS were gay Jews.” At a time…
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Shobha Nehru, A Quiet Witness To History, Dies At 108
Shobha Nehru, who died on April 25 at age 108, proved that humanistic ties to family roots never fade. Born Magdolna Friedmann in Budapest in 1908, she witnessed Hungarian anti-Semitism, which led her father to change the family name to the less Jewish-sounding Forbath. This new appellation led to a school nickname, Fori, which she…
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