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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Masha Gessen, Elliot Ackerman Among National Book Awards Finalists
Masha Gessen and Elliot Ackerman are among the finalists for this year’s National Book Awards. Such an honor to be on this list. Thank you @nationalbook https://t.co/rjkb3yMrWd — Elliot Ackerman (@elliotackerman) October 4, 2017 Gessen’s “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” released this week, is a finalist for the award in nonfiction. Ackerman’s…
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Why This ‘Honorary Jew’ Deserved The Nobel Prize For Literature
Although last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature went to a deserving Jewish candidate, in some respects the prize-giving and receiving process was a shondeh, that ever-current Yiddish word meaning disgrace. Not least when Bob Dylan, the honoree, plagiarized portions of his Nobel Prize lecture from SparkNotes, an online version of CliffsNotes, according to [Slate.] (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/06/did_bob_dylan_take_from_sparknotes_for_his_nobel_lecture.html)…
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Who’s Art Garfunkel’s Favorite Artist? Hint: It Rhymes With Bart Carfunkel
You learn a lot of things about Art Garfunkel in his new memoir, “What Is It All But Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man” (Knopf). For example, you learn what songs are on his iPod (hint: a lot of Art Garfunkel songs). You learn that, as of the book’s writing, he has read 361,980 pages,…
The Latest
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Film & TV Was This Austro-Jewish Refugee Hollywood’s Greatest Screenwriter?
Picture if you will the screenwriter: hunched over a keyboard, mainlining caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, or all of the above, exploited by a stupid and greedy industry, but rebelliously, vainly proud. And very often, Jewish. Vulture has paid homage to the humble screenwriter, compiling a grand, ranked list of the 100 Best Screenwriters of All Time….
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Arthur Janov, The Jewish Creator Of Primal Scream Therapy
Arthur Janov, who died on Sunday October 1 aged 93, was the creator of the now largely-ignored psychotherapeutic system, Primal Scream Therapy. A dramatic psychic system, it captured the imagination of John Lennon in the 1970s and Tears for Fears in the 1980s. Though many psychotherapists disputed the efficacy of PST, an article in Vice…
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That Time Tom Petty Toured The Western Wall
Tom Petty, one of the most popular and beloved singers and songwriters in rock music since the late 1970s, died at UCLA Santa Monica Hospital on Monday, October 2, after suffering cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu. Petty, age 66, had just wrapped up a big tour with his band, the Heartbreakers, which ended…
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With ‘The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),’ Noah Baumbach Returns To His Unhappy Place
Regardless of where one is in life or how degrading one’s surroundings may become, family has the ability to dig into us in a special way that nothing else can. Noah Baumbach appears to have internalized this lesson, a sense of how those closest to us can make us more miserable than even the cold…
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Roz Chast Loves Everything About Manhattan — Even The Cockroaches
As Roz Chast informs readers in her new book, “Going Into Town: A Love Letter To New York,” from Bloomsbury USA, grilled cheese is a blissfully safe food to eat in the gustatory wilds of Manhattan. That, and eggs: “YOU CANNOT GO TOO WRONG,” she writes. The instruction’s uncontained maternal anxiety is charming; “Going Into…
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Film & TV How Monty Hall Made A Deal For Jewish Charity
Although Monty Hall, who died on September 30 at the age of 96, is chiefly remembered for co-creating and hosting the long-lasting TV game show “Let’s Make a Deal,” first broadcast in 1963, his most enduring legacy may be service to Jewish charities. Born Monte Halparin in Winnipeg to Orthodox Jewish parents, Hall would follow…
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A Gloria Steinem Biopic Is Coming, Thanks To Julie Taymor And Sarah Ruhl
Gloria Steinem, author and feminist activist, has done quite a bit for women. Now, a Jewish woman will bring her story to the big screen. Tony Award-winning director Julie Taymor, mastermind of the acclaimed Broadway adaptation of “The Lion King,” will direct an adaptation of Steinem’s 2015 memoir “My Life on the Road” for June…
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Can You Leave The Orthodox And Remain Culturally Hasidic?
Who Will Lead Us? The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America By Samuel Heilman University of California Press, 336 pages, $26.95 A friend of mine, the blogger once known as “Shtreimel,” author of the popular (but now-defunct) website “A Hassid and a Heretic,” was a member of the Belz Hasidic sect when he began,…
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