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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Film & TV
The Secret Jewish History Of Watership Down
Richard Adams never intended his 1972 novel, “Watership Down,” to be an allegory. And a book about a group of rabbits certainly doesn’t have a Jewish ring to it. Chocolate versions of them are eaten to celebrate Easter. They aren’t even kosher animals — despite the fact that they chew the cud, they don’t have…
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Can Natalie Portman And Jonathan Safran Foer Save The World From Humans?
It’s difficult to tell 98% of your audience that they are inhumanly cruel and then not lose them. But that’s what producers Jonathan Safran Foer, Natalie Portman and Christopher Dillon Quinn hope to do with “Eating Animals.” It’s a new movie whose subject is the production and consumption of food from animals, loosely based on…
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Music ‘Yiddish Under The Stars’ Turns Central Park Into Fabulous ‘Panoply Of Sounds’
Central Park’s annual SummerStage Festival, typically the domain of Americana artists like Rhiannon Giddens, rap veterans including Public Enemy, indie rock legends such as the Feelies, latter-day folkies like the Indigo Girls, jazz artists including McCoy Tyner and Roy Haynes, and Afropop stars such as King Sunny Adé, took on a decidedly Ashkenazic tinge last…
The Latest
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At Historic Synagogue, A Hopeful Meditation On Loss Takes Flight
The aluminum chairs — off-kilter and whimsically rugged, as if Chagall had ventured into furniture-making — soar above the women’s balcony, held aloft by two golden birds. Sunlight, softened through stained glass, bounces off the pair’s upturned legs. The sculpture, by Kiki Smith, a renowned sculptor and printmaker, is called “Homecoming.” It’s easy to think,…
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Art The Secret Jewish History Of Rosie The Riveter
At the end of World War II, fascism seemed to have met its well-deserved end, a result far from inevitable when the conflict began. The New York Historical Society exhibit “Rockwell, Roosevelt, & the Four Freedoms,” open through September 2, reminds visitors how fragile democracy appeared at the time. While American men served overseas, women’s…
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The Secret Jewish History Of The World Cup
The World Cup comes around every four years, just like the Olympic Games, except the Olympics are for amateurs. And if you’re an American, chances are you are indifferent at best or totally oblivious at worst about the single thing that, more than any other, unites all humanity. The World Cup is reportedly the most…
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The Melodramatic, Bloated, Indulgent Brilliance of Luchino Visconti
On April 15, 1944, in Rome, Fascist soldiers captured Luchino Visconti di Modrone, the Count of Lonate Pozzolo. Since the late thirties, the Count had been a loyal Communist, sheltering party members in his mansion and even selling family jewels to fund Mussolini’s defeat. As Peter Bondanella explains in “A History of Italian Cinema,” Visconti…
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It Took A Move To Alaska, A Moose And Four Years Without Plumbing For Me To Find My Jewish Soul
According to family lore, my great-grandmother had three sets of dentures: One for dairy, one for meat and one for Passover. I fear she would be rolling in her grave if she knew that I lived without running water for four years. It’s debatable whether I maintained one set of clean dishes; the prospect of…
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Music My Dad, Leonard Bernstein, Introduced Us To The Beatles
The following is an excerpt from “Famous Father Girl,” by Jamie Bernstein. Copyright © 2018 by Jamie Bernstein. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. In February of 1964, halfway through my sixth-grade year, the Beatles came to America. By coincidence, Aunt Shirley was returning from a trip to England on the same…
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Lev Dodin, One Of Russia’s Great Directors, Confronts A Loveless World
I have been thinking, recently, about the prevalence of female suicide in literature. It started when I saw Simon Stone’s update of Federico García Lorca’s play “Yerma,” in which the unnamed main character kills herself, driven mad by her inability to conceive a child. I was troubled by the choice; in the original “Yerma,” the…
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‘The Band’s Visit’ Sweeps Up Tonys
UPDATED: Based on one of Israel’s most celebrated movies — the multiple Ophir-winning “Bikur HaTizmoret” (“The Band’s Visit,” 2007) by Eran Kolirin — “The Band’s Visit” is this year’s surprise Broadway hit. The musical debuted with Tony Shalhoub (“Monk” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) playing — and singing! — alongside Katrina Lenk (who recently starred…
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