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 A Jewish Author Is Helping Exiled Writers Find Asylum
Las Vegas seems an unlikely haven for intellectuals. But for years, a literary center at its University of Nevada campus has quietly welcomed exiled writers under threat in their home countries. Now, as President Trump’s immigration actions send chills through refugee communities, the City of Asylum project is launching an ambitious national expansion. “We’re asking…
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Is Michael Chabon A Better Writer Because He Doesn’t Use A Lot Of Exclamation Points???!!!
At least according to the forces behind the National Jewish Book Awards, Michael Chabon is something of an accomplished writer. But what, exactly, makes him so good? A new analysis by statistician Ben Blatt, author of the recently published “Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve,” measures how well a group of 50 authors, plucked from lists…
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Ever Wonder Who Your Favorite Artist Was Reading? Now You Can Find Out
Have you ever wanted to know what your favorite author was listening to? What your favorite musician was reading? What your favorite chef considered to be a luxury item? Well, now you find out thanks to an archival project by the BBC. The network has recently digitized the entire catalogue of the Desert Island Discs…
The Latest
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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…
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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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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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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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