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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Film & TV
A (Not-So) Brief History of Every Jewish Ritual Ever Seen On Film Or TV
I had unconsciously trained myself, as an observant Jew living among other observant Jews, to watch all television at a remove. McDonald’s ads didn’t affect me; the sandwiches on screen barely registered as food. I wore a yarmulke, but had no expectation that anyone on screen would do the same. I identified with characters and…
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Was Obama The ‘Most Jewish’ President Ever?
(JTA) — He was just 24, but speechwriter David Litt had already become President Obama’s go-to guy for anything considered “kishke-related.” In Litt’s parlance, that meant he wrote the president’s speeches that aimed to connect with Jewish Americans on a gut level — things like holiday and anniversary commemorations, but not, say, Israel or foreign…
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Music Why The Village Voice Was Crazy To Put Bob Dylan On Its Last Cover
Had I been eating soup when I saw the cover of this week’s farewell issue of the Village Voice, I would have spit up. There, on the cover, is a full-page photograph of Bob Dylan, circa 1965, taken in Greenwich Village, saluting the camera in a manner which, one supposes, could be viewed as a…
The Latest
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Film & TV Jerry Seinfeld’s New Netflix Special Doesn’t Matter — Does That Matter?
There’s a scene toward the end of Jerry Seinfeld’s new Netflix special “Jerry Before Seinfeld” where the man himself is sitting cross-legged in the middle of a street just behind a single accordion folder. The road surface is paved with notepad paper taken from that folder in which he stored every single stand up joke…
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Film & TV The Heretical Gnosticism Of Darren Aronofsky’s Most Daring Film
I chose to see Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, “mother!” without reading anything about it. All I could infer from its posters was that it would be scary, and all I could tell from Facebook was that my friends had strong opinions about it. Little did I know that I’d be watching two hours of mystical…
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Music WATCH: Leonard Cohen’s Posthumous Video For ‘Leaving The Table’
The 2017 Polaris Gala, whose website says they aim to present awards to Canadian artists based on their “artistic integrity,” took place Monday, September 18. Among the evening’s delights was a new posthumous video for Leonard Cohen’s “Leaving The Table,” from his final album, “You Want It Darker.” The animated video opens and closes with…
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes And Their Mexican-Jewish Western
Machismo has become a sort of catchall phrase for aggressive masculinity, but its original meaning refers to something more specific, stranger, and more dangerous. It is this latter definition that propels the action of the recently-resurrected 1966 film “Time to Die” that is playing at Film Forum through Thursday, September 21. I’m not an expert,…
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How Modigliani’s Jewishness Informed His Art
In the first room of the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit “Modigliani Unmasked,” a case displays two issues of La Libre Parole, the early-20th century French anti-Semitic newspaper founded by Édouard Drumont. The covers of both feature caricatures of Jewish men, their features overblown and bulbous. Hung on a nearby wall is Modigliani’s 1908 painting “The…
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Adam Gopnik Takes On Two Great Taboos: Ambition, And Sex With His Wife
If you are a recent New York transplant who has found yourself possessed with longing for a time when the city must have felt more authentic, when you might have wandered the streets with great minds, shopped in distinctive stores, and felt exalted feelings, Adam Gopnik has a cure. Two words: Rodents and insects. “All…
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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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The Secret Jewish History of Cat Stevens Revisited
When I went off to sleep-away camp in 1972 for the first time, the soundtrack of the summer — especially for those like me, who arrived with guitar in hand — was all Cat Stevens, all the time. By 1972, Stevens had already achieved his greatest success with a stunning trio of albums released in…
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