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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How Did A Yiddish Opera Wind Up In Cuba Of All Places?
You may have heard that the Yiddish-Cuban opera “Hatuey: Memory of Fire,” made its way to Havana in early March. Despite issues with a finicky old sound system, the premiere was a huge success and the opera has received extensive coverage in the Cuban press. It may seem like a miracle that this opera, based…
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Garth Drabinsky Returns To The Theater — And It’s Not A Pretty Sight
An overproduced, overcomplicated mess. Cringe-worthy. Bloated. The reviews are in for “Sousatka” which opened last night in Toronto. And they’re not pretty. The musical was supposed to mark a triumphant return for Garth Drabinsky, the fallen film and theater producer who was sent to the slammer in 2009 for fraud and forgery. Drabinsky, whose Broadway…
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The International Street Cannibals Ensemble Tackles Schoenberg’s Tortured Quartet
When faced with immense personal grief, we are given to sobbing, to wailing, to screaming – the old categories of expression seem startlingly, absurdly inadequate, and thus we revert to a pre-linguistic stage so that we might give voice to those things that render language so helplessly impotent. But one could just as easily see this…
The Latest
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You Can Now Read Saul Bellow’s Personal Papers At The University Of Chicago
Scholars of Saul Bellow, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, can now peruse the most sizable collection of his personal papers that has yet been made available at the University of Chicago Library. Bellow, whose works include “Herzog,” “The Adventures of Augie March,” and “Humboldt’s Gift,” was a professor at the University for three decades….
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Would Fran Lebowitz Give Trump A Book? ‘It Would Depend On Who’s Reading It To Him’
Author, public speaker, and sardonic truth-teller of our dreams, Fran Lebowitz, has never been anything less than a character. In 1978, The New York Times’s review of her first collection of essays, “Metropolitan Life,” called her “irresistibly cranky;” one gets the sense that, had she read the review, she might have had the credo embroidered…
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Art Is Completely Useless – Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing
Look to any conservative site for an article decrying the existence of the National Endowment of the Arts and you will inevitably find a mention of Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It’s easy outrage fodder for obvious reasons — a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine is intentionally provocative, intentionally difficult, and, here is…
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Film & TV How Chuck Barris Turned Jewish Anxiety Into A Multimillion Dollar Industry
Charles Hirsch Barris, who died on March 21 at age 87, proved that one Jewish man’s inner conflicts could entertain America in a series of game shows. Creator of TV’s “The Dating Game” and “The Newlywed Game,” in the ‘60s, Barris also launched and hosted “The Gong Show” in the 1970s, tapping into such matters…
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Bob Dylan Reveals Love For Amy Winehouse, ‘I Love Lucy,’ And — Possibly — Kabbalah
Woe to the soul who dares to assume they can make sense of Bob Dylan. In a new Q & A with the Nobel Prize-winning singer and songwriter, published by Dylan’s website in advance of the release of his three-disc set of standards, “Triplicate,” Bill Flanagan attempted to get the great man to reveal some…
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The New York Times Has A New Theater Critic — But What Does He Think Of Arthur Miller?
Today, The New York Times announced that its new co-chief theater critic would be Jesse Green, currently of New York Magazine. Green will join the Times on May 1. To get a sense of what Green will bring to the Times, where he will have equal footing with current chief critic Ben Brantley — the…
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How Translators Are Helping To Resist Trump’s Immigration Policies
Translators are stepping up to the plate to help refugees, immigrants, and travelers traveling to or living in the U.S. The impetus for forming the brand-new Translation Outreach Network was the widely-publicized case of Henry Rousso, a prominent Holocaust scholar who was detained for more than ten hours on his way to an academic conference….
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Remembering Jerry Krause — The Nebbish Hero Of Chicago Sports
He was perhaps the ultimate sports management nebbish. Jerry Krause, a scout and general manager in professional baseball and basketball, died yesterday at 77 from what appeared to be multiple health problems. Often referred to, for news expediency, as “the architect” of the six-time (in only eight years) champion Chicago Bulls of the 1990s, Krause’s…
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Yiddish ייִדיש־סימפּאָזיום אין דײַטשלאַנד גיט איבער נײַע אַנדטעקונגען וועגן אַלט־ייִדישYiddish symposium in Germany shares discoveries about Old Yiddish
די אָנטיילנעמערס זענען געווען נישט בלויז ערנסטע אַקאַדעמיקערס, נאָר צום טייל אויך קינסטלערס און אַקטיוויסטן
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Yiddish World The surprising thing I learned about my tough-as-nails Bubby
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Fast Forward Robert Jay Lifton, pioneering scholar of Nazi doctors and Jewish memory, dies at 98
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