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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Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen Among Winners Of Prestigious Metropolitan Opera Competition
Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, a 23-year-old countertenor and recent Princeton graduate, was named one of six winners of this year’s Metropolitan National Council Auditions. The award is one of the most prestigious granted to young opera singers; past winners include Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, and Eric Owens. In the competition’s last round, the Grand Finals Concert…
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Was Lou Reed A Lot More Jewish Than We Thought He Was?
Lou Reed’s archives are headed to the New York Public Library, courtesy of Reed’s widow, performance artist Laurie Anderson. There are already two display cases of items on view in the lobby of the library’s main branch at 42nd Street, where Reed scholars or the merely curious can read the handwritten lyrics to the song,…
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My Guinea Pig’s Bar Mitzvah: What We Learned
It seemed appropriate to plan our guinea pig’s bar mitzvah for the Purim weekend. My daughter is an eager new attendee at Hebrew school and can’t wait to be bat mitzvah. Given her age she has a few years to wait, but she decided that, at 25 months, Snickers the guinea pig had reached the…
The Latest
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Why The NEH Is So Critical To Our Future
The news of the proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) comes at precisely the moment we feel the most grateful for the agency’s support. On Thursday morning, as the budget proposal made headlines, we were busy preparing for Friday’s opening of “1917: How One Year Changed the World” and the American…
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How A Funny Jewish Game Called Rummikub Became An International Sensation
This past fall I visited my friends Geraldine and Israel, formerly of the Queens neighborhood Forest Hills, at their new rustic fixer-upper along the Hudson. The fireplace was working, the couch was in place, but the room was still surrounded by a cityscape of boxes waiting to be unpacked. Geraldine reached into one, grabbing something…
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At Book Launch, A Broadway Playwright Discusses His ‘Lurid Past’ — And, Perhaps, Present
The night was cold and sure to get colder, and at the playwright Sherman Yellen’s Upper East Side apartment, talk of snow, predicted the next morning in abundance, was so earnest as to make one nearly see it already. In fact, ensconced in the warm dim light of the 11th-story living room with a glass…
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Remembering Chuck Berry And How Jewish Record Men Helped Him Invent Rock Music
Editor’s Note: Chuck Berry died on March 18, at the age of 90. In the fall of 2016, in honor of Berry’s 90th birthday, Seth Rogovoy wrote this article paying tribute to Berry and the role that Jewish record men had in his rise to glory. More than any other singular individual – including Elvis…
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How Nobel Prize-Winning Poet Derek Walcott Identified With The Jews
Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from the West Indies who died March 17 at age 87, was long inspired by Jewish culture, history and friendships. As the literary scholar Bénédicte Ledent has pointed out, Walcott’s poem “A Far Cry from Africa” draws a “parallel between blacks and Jews.” The poem, about the Mau Mau…
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In New Broadway Hit Musical, A Rabbi Makes An Unlikely Cameo
On Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government closed American airspace to all traffic. Every trans-Atlantic flight less than halfway to its destination was ordered to return to Europe. Those closer to the United States were diverted to Newfoundland . It hardly seems the stuff of musicals, but those next four days are at the center…
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Norman Podhoretz, One Of The Last Great New York Intellectuals, Is Holding His Ground
Norman Podhoretz, 87, has lost more influential friends than most people ever dream of making — among them playwright Lillian Hellman, critic Lionel Trilling, philosopher Hannah Arendt, and novelist Norman Mailer. In John Leland’s new profile of Podhoretz for The New York Times, one thing is clear: For Podhoretz, those feuds are as intellectually vivid…
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Chaim Potok’s Daughter On Playing A Muslim Mother: ‘Devotion Is Devotion’
Naama Potok, daughter of the famed novelist Chaim Potok, has been acting for over three decades. Now, as Playbill’s Joe Gambino reported, she’s taken on a role that’s entirely new to her: That of a Muslim mother in Iran. “I fully honor and accept the profound differences that exist between and among people,” Potok told…
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