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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Irving Penn Gets Intimate — Very Intimate — At The Met
In portraits, Irving Penn liked to photograph his subjects at the mercy of their creations. He shot the fashion designer, Charles James sprawled with near-sensuous resignation at the foot of a mannequin wearing a ball gown; Salvador Dalí with his angular face jutting out as if pulled forward, relentlessly, by his expertly waxed mustache; Gianni…
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Music The Secret Jewish History Of Tears For Fears
Tears for Fears are touring the world again — playing Tel Aviv on July 5 — and are promising fans a new album. You already know “Shout” or “Mad World” or any one of those songs that made them one of the most fascinating bands of the ‘80s. You may also know that the songs…
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Wanna Talk About David Mamet’s Play? It’ll Cost You 25 Grand
David Mamet seems to be a bit of an oddity in the arts world. On the one hand, he is a renowned playwright, known for works like “Glengarry Glen Ross” (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984). On the other hand, he wrote the screenplay for the disastrously terrible “The Untouchables.” On the…
The Latest
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Books Amazon Bookstore: Think British, Read Yiddish
‘First they drive all the bookshops out of business, then they open a bookshop.” A fleeing British tourist voiced the suspicion of New Yorkers still mourning many of the city’s deceased independent bookstores at the May 25 opening of the Amazon bookstore in New York’s Time Warner Center. What’s the point of such a store?…
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Klezmer Is Alive And Well — And These 5 Recordings Prove It
There’s a branch of musical discourse, typified by the neo-classical puritanism of Wynton Marsalis, that likes to distinguish between “real” jazz and “fake” jazz. The “real” or “genuine” or “authentic” is almost always, as you would guess, the old – the “fake” or “inauthentic” being, of course, newer sounds. It’s distinction that, for me, misses something…
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What Is Our Greatest Holocaust Film Director Doing In North Korea?
Over the course of his nearly fifty-year career as a filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann has traveled from the Middle East to the Nazi death camps. The 91-year-old documentary legend’s latest, “Napalm,” unexpectedly takes us to North Korea, where Lanzmann travelled in 1958 as part of the first Western delegation to be officially invited to the country…
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Meet The Greatest Jewish Baseball Hero You’ve Never Heard Of
If you don’t know about Sy Rosenthal, then you don’t know about the complete story of Jews in baseball. Most baseball fans are aware of the many inspirational stories produced by Jewish players in the big leagues. Naturally, the most well-known tales focus on the two biggest stars. Hank Greenberg bravely overcame rampant Anti-semitism in…
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Was Leonard Cohen A Zionist?
The short answer is no. He was a mensch, not to say the two things are mutually exclusive. The long answer follows. On May 21st, a celebratory concert in Israel for Yom Yerushalayim featured an English-Hebrew rendition of “Hallelujah,” by far Leonard Cohen’s most misused song (if you don’t count the millions of questionable hook-ups…
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For Joseph Brodsky, On His Birthday
Today we celebrate the birthdays of two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: One dead, one alive, one American by way of Russia, one American by way of Minnesota. One deserved his prize, one — ahem, Bob Dylan — did not, but that’s another story. Let’s pay tribute to the deserving one. Joseph Brodsky…
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History Of ‘Top Gun’
Over the past 30 years, quite a few adrenaline-fueled drivers have uttered the famous line from “Top Gun:” “I feel the need…the need for speed.” A substantial percentage of them were likely pulled over shortly after making the proclamation, but when Tom Cruise takes once more to the air as Navy pilot “Maverick” Mitchell, there…
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Michael Bloomberg Gives $75 Million To New Manhattan Arts Center
Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is still helping shape the city, most recently in the form of a $75 million gift to the Shed Arts Center. The cultural hub, currently under construction in Hudson Yards, is intended to open in the spring of 2019, featuring a range of performance and gallery spaces, as…
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