Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Yes, She’s Art Spiegelman’s Daughter. Her Memoir Is Stunning.
At some point, most people I know who can see have had, and then made fun of, a conversation about whether we perceive colors in the same way. It’s a question that’s easy to dismiss, mostly because it tends to be asked in states of something other than sobriety; but it’s not a subject of…
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Menachem Pressler’s Life in Music From Kristallnacht to Lang Lang
The German-born Israeli-American pianist Menahem Pressler will be 93 in December. Best recalled as long-time cornerstone of the Beaux Arts Trio, Pressler has since thrived as a solo performer and collaborative musician. He also continues a distinguished teaching career at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University and overseas. “This Desire for Beauty”, a book…
The Latest
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How Pianist Irving Fields Redefined Jewish Music
Irving Fields, the songwriter and pianist who died on August 20 at age 101, revealed talent that transcended the question of what is authentic Jewish music. Born Yitzhak Schwartz in New York to parents from Minsk and Pinsk, he was raised in Coney Island and Bensonhurst. An amateur choir singer, his father got him involved…
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How Steven Hill, ‘Law & Order’ Actor, Chose Orthodox Faith Over Stardom
Steven Hill, an actor who died on August 23 at age 94, showed how the solution for existential unease may be found in Jewish ritual rather than in a life devoted to performance. Born Solomon Krakovsky in Seattle, Hill won fame from 1990 to 2000 in the role of Manhattan District Attorney Adam Schiff on…
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Play Inspired By Gilad Shalit Finds Humanity In Captivity
The day after I saw Cassie M. Seinuk’s “From the Deep,” a play about the mental struggles of captivity, at NYC Fringe, I ran into Charles Linshaw, one of two actors in the play, waiting in line to see another Fringe production. Even though I knew that Linshaw, who plays the Israeli Ilan in “From…
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Cynthia Ozick Has Issues — And Come To Think of It, So Do We
CRITICS, MONSTERS, FANATICS, AND OTHER LITERARY ESSAYS By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 224 pages, $25 It’s a little tricky, perhaps, to complain about Cynthia Ozick’s take on book reviewers in “Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays” when I made my living for many years reviewing books. How can I play anything other than…
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Why Yiddish Is Gaining Traction in Secular Households
There once was a place known as Yiddish Land. It wasn’t a country. In fact, it lived and breathed for a thousand years in total disregard for the invisible borders sovereign nations fought and died over. Its citizens — German Jews, Polish Jews, Jews throughout Central Europe and across the world — numbered nearly 12…
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What’s Behind the Boom in Orthodox Women Singers?
‘My singing is not an act of rebellion. It’s what I’m meant to do,” said Perl Wolfe, lead singer of the now defunct Hasidic rock band Bulletproof Stockings. “The rebbe said, ‘You’re supposed to take your God-given talents and use them for the betterment of human kind.’ I’m creating a space for women to have…
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How To Read The Talmud With Strings Attached
How many guitars do you have?” a friend asked me recently, knowing that a new one was about to arrive. “Oh, we don’t count them,” I told her jokingly as my wife, Barbara, raised her hands and flashed her palms with all her fingers up. “All I can say,” I said, “is that if they…
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How Judaism Still Brings My Father Closer to Me
Shortly after my mother left him, my father started going to synagogue regularly for the first time in his life. He would bring 7-year-old me with him on Friday nights as the official start to our weekends together, usually followed by banana splits at Baskin-Robbins. He’d been untethered before, living in an abandoned factory in…
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At the New Museum, We’re All Collectors — Especially the Museum Itself
There’s much to be learned from the name of the New Museum’s new exhibit “The Keeper.” The show is in fact an assemblage of the efforts of numerous keepers, artists who have collected, arranged, stored and displayed objects in unusual ways. It makes the singular title a bit of an odd fit. Is the exhibit…
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Fast Forward Trump administration says Columbia University ‘continually failed to protect Jewish students’
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Art Ben Shahn was a radical artist — why didn’t he want to be called a Jewish one?
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