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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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…
The Latest
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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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Why Fyre Festival Is The Greatest Event Of 2017 So Far
It must have been planned this way, it must have. It’s simply too perfect. Too deliciously, lip smackingly, perfect. It’s just too fun, too funny. It’s a gift, truly. I am speaking, of course, about the Fyre Festival, the greatest thing to ever happen to the music festival world. The Fyre Festival is so much…
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Music The Secret Jewish History Of Procol Harum
Fifty years ago this spring, a then unknown British rock group called Procol Harum released its very first single, “A Whiter Shade Of Pale.” The distinctive recording went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom and hit the top 10 in the United States, casting the mold somewhat for “progressive rock” on its way to…
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How The JCC Manhattan Inspired This Tribeca Film Festival Winner
What does it take to win two of the Tribeca Film Festival’s most prestigious prizes? Apparently, aside from talent, willpower and funding, a dose of inspiration from the JCC Manhattan will do the trick. Director and writer Rachel Israel’s film “Keep the Change” took home the Festival’s juried awards for Best U.S. Narrative Feature and…
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Are These Jewish Writers America’s Best Young Novelists?
A look at Granta magazine's list
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What Jews Can Learn From ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
When Margaret Atwood published “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1984, the dystopian genre in literature was about to change. The books that had defined it, including Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” had been preoccupied with the threat of socialist totalitarianism. Atwood wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale” in West Berlin, in the shadow of…
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In ‘Natasha,’ David Bezmozgis Captures Russian Jews Caught Between Two Worlds
Writer-director David Bezmozgis is cautiously optimistic about the fate of his flick, “Natasha,” adapted from the title story in his critically acclaimed collection (“Natasha and other stories,” 2004) and marking his second outing as a filmmaker. “Natasha” is the first film to explore the little known Russian-born Jewish subculture in Toronto that was spawned from…
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