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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He May Be Our Greatest Jewish Thinker — But What Does He Think About Jewish Thought?
Editor’s note: George Steiner is generally regarded as one of the most significant Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. He has taught at Oxford University, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, among others, and his books include the classic of criticism, “Tolstoy Or Dostoevsky,” “The Death Of Tragedy” and “In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards The Redefinition…
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WATCH: A 90-Year Old English Gentleman Becomes A German Rabbi
(JTA) — For many Germans, Rabbi William “Willy” Wolff is the first Jewish religious leader they have ever met. And he’s the perfect man for the job. Diminutive, with a disarming chuckle and twinkling eyes, Wolff, who turned 90 in February, effortlessly breaks down that uniquely German condition of “Berührungsangst” – literally “fear of contact” with others….
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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…
The Latest
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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…
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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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