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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A Madoff Victim’s Daughter Responds To HBO’s ‘Wizard Of Lies’
Nine years ago, Mom and Dad lost their whole life savings to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. They never knew it, though. The good years of their lives were over before the bad year happened. Dad was a retired gastroenterologist in the thick of his dementia when Madoff was arrested, so he never took in that…
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Philip Roth Doesn’t Believe He’s An American Jew
Is Philip Roth an American Jew? The answer seems obvious, except to the novelist himself. In an essay for The New Yorker titled “I Have Fallen in Love With American Names” and adapted from Roth’s 2002 speech accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Roth takes a dreamlike look back…
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Film & TV The Hero Who Saved An American Battalion 100 Years Ago
(JTA) — In celebration of its 2017 centennial, JTA is highlighting stories from its archive. (JTA) — Things weren’t looking good for the more than 500 Allied soldiers trapped by German forces in France’s Argonne Forest in November 1918. Not only were they under fire from the Germans, they also were being bombarded with shells from Americans…
The Latest
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How To Garden Like Colette and Virginia Woolf
Editor’s Note: The following article is excerpted from “My City Highrise Garden,” a new book by famed feminist author Susan Brownmiller about the garden she maintains atop her Manhattan apartment building. One summer day the editor of a women’s magazine visited my garden with her assistant. They were preparing a feature on how the busy…
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Irving Penn Gets Intimate — Very Intimate — At The Met
In portraits, Irving Penn liked to photograph his subjects at the mercy of their creations. He shot the fashion designer, Charles James sprawled with near-sensuous resignation at the foot of a mannequin wearing a ball gown; Salvador Dalí with his angular face jutting out as if pulled forward, relentlessly, by his expertly waxed mustache; Gianni…
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Music The Secret Jewish History Of Tears For Fears
Tears for Fears are touring the world again — playing Tel Aviv on July 5 — and are promising fans a new album. You already know “Shout” or “Mad World” or any one of those songs that made them one of the most fascinating bands of the ‘80s. You may also know that the songs…
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Wanna Talk About David Mamet’s Play? It’ll Cost You 25 Grand
David Mamet seems to be a bit of an oddity in the arts world. On the one hand, he is a renowned playwright, known for works like “Glengarry Glen Ross” (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984). On the other hand, he wrote the screenplay for the disastrously terrible “The Untouchables.” On the…
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Books Amazon Bookstore: Think British, Read Yiddish
‘First they drive all the bookshops out of business, then they open a bookshop.” A fleeing British tourist voiced the suspicion of New Yorkers still mourning many of the city’s deceased independent bookstores at the May 25 opening of the Amazon bookstore in New York’s Time Warner Center. What’s the point of such a store?…
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Klezmer Is Alive And Well — And These 5 Recordings Prove It
There’s a branch of musical discourse, typified by the neo-classical puritanism of Wynton Marsalis, that likes to distinguish between “real” jazz and “fake” jazz. The “real” or “genuine” or “authentic” is almost always, as you would guess, the old – the “fake” or “inauthentic” being, of course, newer sounds. It’s distinction that, for me, misses something…
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What Is Our Greatest Holocaust Film Director Doing In North Korea?
Over the course of his nearly fifty-year career as a filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann has traveled from the Middle East to the Nazi death camps. The 91-year-old documentary legend’s latest, “Napalm,” unexpectedly takes us to North Korea, where Lanzmann travelled in 1958 as part of the first Western delegation to be officially invited to the country…
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Meet The Greatest Jewish Baseball Hero You’ve Never Heard Of
If you don’t know about Sy Rosenthal, then you don’t know about the complete story of Jews in baseball. Most baseball fans are aware of the many inspirational stories produced by Jewish players in the big leagues. Naturally, the most well-known tales focus on the two biggest stars. Hank Greenberg bravely overcame rampant Anti-semitism in…
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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News Who is Bruce Blakeman, the ‘Almost Orthodox’ Jew running for New York governor?
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