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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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Two Years After Arrest, Palestinian Poet Dareen Tatour Awaits A Verdict
On October 11, 2015, the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour was arrested at her home in Reineh, a town in Israel’s Galilee. In November of the same year, in the second of Tatour’s three months in jail, Israeli prosecutors indicted her on counts of incitement to violence and support for a terrorist organization. The charges stemmed…
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Garrison Keillor Is Personally Offended That Philip Roth Hasn’t Won The Nobel Prize
If you have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since 2009, when Garrison Keillor’s top pick John Updike passed away and thus became ineligible for the award, and you are not named Philip Roth, you may expect to be called “a writer of migraines.” That’s the first of many insults lobbed by the former host…
The Latest
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Film & TV How I Fended Off My Own Personal Harvey Weinsteins
“Oy, this is bad for the Jews” is how my parents would have reacted to a scandal involving a Weinstein. They screened every newspaper story with that criterion. I can imagine them bemoaning that calling earthquakes Arlene, Gert, Irma, and Nate would also be “bad for the Jews.” The storm named Harvey, I’m guessing, like…
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Why I’ll Be Teaching Both ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ And This Harvey Weinstein Essay
Jewish humor, like all ethnic humor, is built upon stereotypes, and these stereotypes can often be found in anti-Semitic discourse. There is a fine line between ethnic comedy and outright bigotry, and its reception depends as much on context as on authorial intent. Ever since the early 1960s, when Lenny Bruce went public with his…
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Anne Kauffman’s New Play Sent Her To Synagogue For The First Time In A Decade
A parent has a child with a chronic illness. Obviously, that parent’s life transforms; what, exactly, does it become? That question forms the heart of Amy Herzog’s new play “Mary Jane,” which runs through October 29 at New York Theatre Workshop. Directed by Anne Kauffman and staring Carrie Coon, the play’s title character, a single…
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72 Authors Are Supporting Jill Bialosky Against Plagiarism Accusations. They’re Still Wrong.
Jill Bialosky, the poet, memoirist, novelist and executive editor at W.W. Norton & Company recently accused of plagiarism in her new memoir “Poetry Will Save Your Life,” has a long list of powerful supporters. Former poets laureate Robert Pinsky and Louise Glück, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan, and some 70-odd other authors signed a Letter…
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Annie Baker, Yuval Sharon Named MacArthur Fellows
Playwright Annie Baker and opera director Yuval Sharon are among the cultural figures to be awarded 2017 MacArthur Fellowships. The Fellowships, colloquially known as “genius grants,” come with a no-strings-attached award of $625,000. They are awarded annually to between 20 and 30 Americans across a range of disciplines. The MacArthur Foundation lauded Baker, who won…
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Harvey Weinstein Is Not A Philip Roth Character, Because His Accusers Are Real
Updated, 3:30 p.m.: Mark Oppenheimer has issued an apology through Tablet for his article concerning Harvey Weinstein and Philip Roth, discussed below. Read his comments here. Harvey Weinstein can be said, definitively, to be several things: Formerly one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, a Jew, and unemployed. He can be very substantively alleged…
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Lou Reed Was A Regular Jewish Kid — And Cultural Rebel For The Ages
Lou Reed: A Life By Anthony DeCurtis Little, Brown and Company, 528 pages, $32 At first glance, Lewis Allan Reed wasn’t all that different from the other middle-class Jewish lads he grew up with in 1950s Freeport, New York. He was a diligent student and an avid tennis player; he liked to make weekend forays…
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Simon Schama, Daniel Mendelsohn Shortlisted For Baillie Gifford Prize
Simon Schama’s “Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492-1900” and Daniel Mendelsohn’s “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic” have been shortlisted for this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize, one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary awards for nonfiction. The award, which comes with a prize of £30,000, or close to $40,000, was…
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How ‘E.T.’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’ Reveal Steven Spielberg’s Story
Susan Lacy had a much better interview with Steven Spielberg than I did, so I’m understandably jealous. She spent about 30 hours with the director, and was able to elicit nuggets about his life and work that form the basis of Lacy’s appropriately titled documentary, “Spielberg,” which debuts on HBO Oct. 7. Like many, I’ve…
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