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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This UFO Changes Everything
We at the Forward are delighted to welcome Marty Kaplan to his first column for the Forward. An award-winning columnist for Huffpo and the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Marty will be writing his “Oh Kaplan, My Kaplan” column for us twice a month. His eagle-eyed view from the West Coast promises to be eye-opening, heart-rending…
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Film & TV How A Boy And His Great-Grandfather Bonded Over A Holocaust Story
Elliott Saiontz’s bedroom is crammed with collections. His walls are covered with stickers of football teams and players. There are also dozens of karate trophies, pottery projects and framed autographs of athletes, political figures, even the members of his favorite band, Train. There are a lot of autographs too. But in a corner of the…
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Film & TV Why The Spielberg-Kushner ‘West Side Story’ Might Turn Out Okay
Few American musicals have won more sustained audience devotion than “West Side Story,” the 1957 brainchild of an all-Jewish creative team. Playwright Arthur Laurents, choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, collaborated, despite sustained tensions, to produce a musical that has been staged around the world for six decades and inspired an…
The Latest
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Music Reassessing the Russian Bob Dylan — Vladimir Vysotsky At 80
At a concert hall in southeastern Ukraine, Svetlana Balabukha, 70, says she can remember when she first heard Vladimir Vysotsky. She was 18, a schoolgirl in Donetsk, a town in now-occupied eastern Ukraine. “First of all — what style, what a way of performing!” she says, then smiles and leans a bit closer. “And second…what…
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How The Holocaust Swept Away European Jewish Soccer
Imagine the world’s leading soccer league — the English Premier League, say, or Spain’s La Liga — being won by a Jewish club, with a Jewish name, Jewish owners, Jewish fans and Jewish players wearing a kit bearing a large Star of David. Imagine those players and fans regularly receiving anti-Semitic abuse and violence, but…
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An Epic Tale of Frightening Suffering, Told By One Who Escaped
In 1944, the Forverts, the Yiddish forebear of this newspaper, published Yankel Wiernik’s early and unparalleled account of the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Nazi death camp called Treblinka. The newspaper described Wiernik’s story, “A Year in Treblinka,” as the first eyewitness account of the gas chambers. In great detail,…
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He Fought Polar Bears And Nazis And Was Called ‘The Most Unique Jew Alive’
On December 20, 1934, the New York Jewish Daily Bulletin’s Michel Kraike published an article about one Peter Freuchen: “Eight feet tall, weighing close to 330 pounds, with a head like a grizzly bear’s and a thick, square red beard.” Born in Denmark, Freuchen held a series of professions that, to modern ears, might sound…
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Film & TV Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has An Opinion On Everything, From Feminism To Fish
The documentary “RBG,” a chronicle of the life and career of the United States’ most pop culture-prominent Supreme Court Justice, appears to have made a decisive impact at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking with NPR’s Nina Totenberg after the film’s premiere, presented opinions on Kate McKinnon and the #MeToo movement; as…
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Music Happy Birthday And Farewell To Neil Diamond, Retiring At 77
There are certain things in this life that I pretty much take for granted: Snow will fall in December. A new baseball season will begin in April. And if he’s not already touring somewhere as we speak, Neil Diamond will be going on tour again soon. Which is why the announcement that the multi-platinum-selling singer-songwriter…
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In Israel and New York, Jews Do Battle In Conversation
It’s often said that Jews are a particularly talkative bunch — “the most verbal group in human history,” according to Alfred Kazin in his 1969 review of Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” itself a work of Semitic logorrhea par excellence. This is a pervasive idea, based on a certain reading of Jewish history. In the beginning…
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Hollywood’s Oldest Working Jewish Actress Dies At 105
Old Jewish character actors never die, they just stop going on casting calls. Charles Lane (born Charles Levison; 1905–2007) a mainstay in small roles in Frank Capra films and on the TV series “I Love Lucy,” kvetched during his hundredth birthday celebration that his performing career had recently slowed down. Connie Sawyer, who died on…
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