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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Film & TV The Heretical Gnosticism Of Darren Aronofsky’s Most Daring Film
I chose to see Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, “mother!” without reading anything about it. All I could infer from its posters was that it would be scary, and all I could tell from Facebook was that my friends had strong opinions about it. Little did I know that I’d be watching two hours of mystical…
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Music WATCH: Leonard Cohen’s Posthumous Video For ‘Leaving The Table’
The 2017 Polaris Gala, whose website says they aim to present awards to Canadian artists based on their “artistic integrity,” took place Monday, September 18. Among the evening’s delights was a new posthumous video for Leonard Cohen’s “Leaving The Table,” from his final album, “You Want It Darker.” The animated video opens and closes with…
The Latest
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes And Their Mexican-Jewish Western
Machismo has become a sort of catchall phrase for aggressive masculinity, but its original meaning refers to something more specific, stranger, and more dangerous. It is this latter definition that propels the action of the recently-resurrected 1966 film “Time to Die” that is playing at Film Forum through Thursday, September 21. I’m not an expert,…
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Adam Gopnik Takes On Two Great Taboos: Ambition, And Sex With His Wife
If you are a recent New York transplant who has found yourself possessed with longing for a time when the city must have felt more authentic, when you might have wandered the streets with great minds, shopped in distinctive stores, and felt exalted feelings, Adam Gopnik has a cure. Two words: Rodents and insects. “All…
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How Modigliani’s Jewishness Informed His Art
In the first room of the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit “Modigliani Unmasked,” a case displays two issues of La Libre Parole, the early-20th century French anti-Semitic newspaper founded by Édouard Drumont. The covers of both feature caricatures of Jewish men, their features overblown and bulbous. Hung on a nearby wall is Modigliani’s 1908 painting “The…
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What Jews Can Learn From ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
When Margaret Atwood published “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1984, the dystopian genre in literature was about to change. The books that had defined it, including Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” had been preoccupied with the threat of socialist totalitarianism. Atwood wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale” in West Berlin, in the shadow of…
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The Secret Jewish History of Cat Stevens Revisited
When I went off to sleep-away camp in 1972 for the first time, the soundtrack of the summer — especially for those like me, who arrived with guitar in hand — was all Cat Stevens, all the time. By 1972, Stevens had already achieved his greatest success with a stunning trio of albums released in…
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Paranoia, Spies and Ariel Sharon in Nathan Englander’s Twisty New Thriller
Dinner at the Center of the Earth By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $26.95 In his fiction, Nathan Englander has written with uncommon verve about the varieties of Jewish experience. Among other subjects, he’s tackled the Holocaust and its legacy (“The Tumblers,” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”) the…
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How Emmy Runner-Up Jackie Hoffman Journeyed From Shtetl to Hollywood to Broadway
At last night’s Emmy Awards, actress Jackie Hoffman gained notoriety for seeming, uh, ungracious for her reaction to losing out on a trophy to Laura Dern. To commemorate (or observe) that open, we’re re-running our interview with the actress from earlier this year. Actress/comedienne Jackie Hoffman has long been a fixture on the New York…
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Books The Rebbetzin’s Guide: What To Bring Your Host For Rosh Hashanah
So you’re invited out for a Rosh Hashanah meal — and you’re stuck as to what to bring? We’ve got you covered. For The Gourmand We’re itching for a copy of celebrity Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s Sweet (his publisher should have timed the release better, with the chief holiday of sweets upon us now), but…
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Books In Leaving Orthodoxy, Tova Mirvis Voices Questions Many Secretly Harbor
I was not raised in modern Orthodoxy; I married into it. And as I read Tova Mirvis’ memoir, The Book of Separation, it often felt as though I was reading my own misgivings and hesitations. Her book opens with a chronicling of her first Rosh Hashanah, after leaving her marriage and Orthodox Judaism. Mirvis grew…
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