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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Despite Threats, Congress Proposes NEA Funding Increase, Not Elimination
If there is one thing those of us who oppose Trump can celebrate about the man and his presidency, it is his propensity to abandon proposals he had previously championed — like completely dismantling Obamacare or putting Hillary Clinton in prison, to name a few. His administration’s new budget blueprint, which excludes, for instance, funding…
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‘Oslo,’ ‘Indecent,’ And ‘If I Forget’ Nominated For Drama Desk Awards
Nominees for the 62nd Annual Drama Desk Awards, announced this past Thursday, include J.T. Rogers’s “Oslo,” Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,” and Steven Levenson’s “If I Forget.” Those three plays were each nominated for Outstanding Play. Nominees for Outstanding Musical included “The Band’s Visit,” while “Falsettos” and the Barrow Street Theater’s site-specific staging of “Sweeney Todd: The…
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POEM ALERT: Why Is The New Yorker’s Editor Playing Al Franken?
Editor’s Note: A report that New Yorker David Remnick will be playing the role of Al Franken in a one-night-only Public Theater has moved our correspondent to verse, for better or worse. One is a hero of the liberal bastion The other’s prose stylings are always in fashion When the latter acts the former, on…
The Latest
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What Did May Day Mean To Us In 1898?
Editor’s Note: The following article was published in the May 1, 1898 edition of the Forverts. I still recall the first of May in 1890 when fate sent me to Geneva where a May Day celebration was to take place for the first time since last year’s International Congress. Geneva’s workers decided to celebrate it…
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What Ever Became of the ‘Children of Jerusalem’?
Editor’s Note: ‘What Ever Became of the ‘Children of Jerusalem,’” a longform story by Naomi Zeveloff about the fates of seven Israeli and Palestinian children who starred in a 1990’s Canadian documentary series, is the 2016 Sigma Delta Chi award winner for Non-Deadline Reporting. Between 1991 and 1996, seven Israeli and Palestinian children starred in…
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Mordecai Richler’s Cartoonagrapher Looks Back On a 50 Year Career
Canada’s foremost editorial cartoonist is finally opening up about his long-term relationship with Mordecai Richler, the larger-than-life Montreal-born writer. “I was his official cartoonagrapher,” laughs Terry Mosher, whose acid-dipped cartoons have lampooned blowhards of all stripes in the Montreal Gazette for more than a half-century. “I drew him more than 40 times, including a Time…
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Why Carl Reiner Was The Dreamiest Boss I Ever Had
At 26, after taking dictation and guff from assorted people in show business with egos ranging from inflated to absurdly inflated, I met Carl Reiner. On talk shows he’d seemed like an incredible mensch, so when I heard from a friend that his secretary was leaving, I desperately wanted her job. Reiner would be respectful…
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Caught At Gunpoint, I Had The Best Shabbes Of My Life
I was June 1, 1971, and I was 18 years old. I’d signed a lease with no guarantors for a four-room tenement apartment at 505 West 122nd Street, complete with mice and roaches, just off heroin-ridden Amsterdam Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Sam Weintraub from Great Neck, New York, couldn’t be too choosy for…
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Paula Vogel To Receive Obie Lifetime Achievement Award
Playwright Paula Vogel will receive an Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 62nd Annual Obie Awards. Vogel, who recently made her Broadway debut with “Indecent,” has previously won two Obie Awards. She won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in drama for “How I Learned to Drive,” was awarded the PEN/Laura Pels Award in 1999, has…
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Bob Mankoff, Departing New Yorker Cartoon Editor, Picks His Favorite Jewish Cartoons
Not everybody reads The New Yorker, but the magazine’s distinctive comic style is widely known and emulated. Bob Mankoff is largely to thank for that. Mankoff, who served as the magazine’s comic editor for 20 years, will depart his post this Sunday. During his tenure, The New Yorker cultivated a comic style marked by a…
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LISTEN: A Yiddish Shtetl Song Got Revived On NPR
There’s a certain quality of sound particular to a waltz pattern picked out on a viola that never fails to inspire, in me, at least, some strange sense of longing for a shtetl life that I’ve not only never known, but intrinsically know to be undesirable. My ancestors left the shtetl, after all. It’s a…
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