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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‘The Insult’ Challenges BDS — And It May Just Win An Oscar
Last October, at the Venice Film Festival, Palestinian actor Kamel el Basha won the Best Actor Volpi Cup for his performance in the Ziad Doueiri film “The Insult.” Basha, a respected but low profile theater actor in his first major film role, plays Yasser, a proud Palestinian refugee in Beirut who trades insults with Tony,…
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Remembering Chicago’s Milt Rosenberg — And How He Revived The Art Of Conversation
In recalling Milt Rosenberg, the veteran Chicago radio host who died on January 9 at age 92, the first memory is of a soothing light baritone voice that might have been expected from a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Chicago, where he served as director of the doctoral program in social and…
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How A Master Of Yiddish Cinema Became a Mysterious Roman Prince
By the time of his death in 1965, few would have taken Michal Waszynski for the director of one of the classics of Yiddish cinema. He had been living a surpassingly posh life in Rome, inhabiting a gorgeous urban estate with a social circle that included many of the luminaries of Hollywood and Italian cinema,…
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New York Jewish Film Festival: Five Can’t-Miss Films
Are you a Jewish New Yorker? If so, the likelihood that you will find yourself at the Film Society of Lincoln Center over the next two weeks, as the New York Jewish Film Festival sets in for its annual residency, is fairly high. Given the virtual inevitability of your attendance, what should you see? As…
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National Jewish Book Awards: Golda Meir Biography, David Grossman Win Big
The National Jewish Book Awards have selected Francine Klagsbrun’s “Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel” as the most notable Jewish book of 2017. Other big winners included Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of The Jewish Week of New York, who won the first-ever Carolyn Starman Hessel Mentorship Award — a press release which…
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Q&A: Remembering The Writers Who Defied The Nazis To Save Jewish Texts
Under the Nazi occupation of Poland, if a Jew in Vilna was caught bringing outside goods into the city’s ghetto, they risked paying with their life. Yet a group of Jewish writers and thinkers, a portion of those compelled by the Nazis to aid in the looting of Vilna’s storied institutions of Jewish culture, smuggled…
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Will Oprah Winfrey Be Our First Jewish President?
Now that Oprah Winfrey has all but been inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States – thereby becoming the first woman to hold the office (and only the second African-American) – the question on everyone’s mind is: will Oprah also count as the first Jewish president? Well, let’s see. It’s not true that…
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NPR’s Bob Garfield Is Still Searching For His Identity — Jewish and Otherwise
Bob Garfield has been a newspaper reporter, an ad critic, a roving national correspondent for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and, currently, the host of WNYC’s “On the Media.” Now he’s also a playwright and stage performer, taking his autobiographical one-man show, “Ruggedly Jewish,” to weekend performances around the country. He’ll be at the Majorie S….
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Movie News: ‘Fargo,’ Woody Allen’s Archives, Covering The Golden Globes
It’s officially movie awards season: The Golden Globes, the first major film and television awards show of the year, will take place on Sunday January 7. Catch up on the nominees you’ve missed this weekend, and read on for this past week’s most important movie news. 1) What does “Fargo” have to do with President…
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Film & TV Woody Allen’s Misogynist Archives Are A Problem. So Is The Viewpoint Of Those Who Assess Them.
In the post-Weinstein moment, Woody Allen is something of an anomaly. His adopted daughter Dylan Farrow has publicly restated her decades-old accusation that Allen sexually assaulted her when she was seven years old; in 2016, Allen’s son Ronan Farrow, whose deeply reported stories in the New Yorker on the allegations against Weinstein and Weinstein’s attempts…
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Yiddish Cabaret in Israel Brings Odessa To Tel Aviv
Recently, a sold-out crowd packed the Sholom Aleichem House in Tel Aviv for Yiddish cabaret. The crowd swayed and sang to Yiddish songs, including one about a young woman who reaches Buenos Aires and sleeps in the train station, and thinks of her dear mother, who she left back home. The entranced, standing-room-only crowd seemed…
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