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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Largest Collection of Hebrew Books Sold to Israel Library
The National Library of Israel has just acquired the largest private collection of Hebrew books and manuscripts in the world — including rare treasures such as a 1491 chumash from Lisbon, Portugal, and one of only two surviving copies of a 1556 Passover Haggadah from Prague. The complex deal for the famed Valmadonna Trust Library,…
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Approaching His 80th Birthday, Philip Glass Still Fighting ‘Minimalist’ Label
Phillip Glass, who turns 80 on Jan 31st, is a man struggling with his legacy, at least how it exists in the popular mind. “If people called me an American opera composer it would have the virtue of being what I actually do”, he told the Guardian yesterday. “This is reality. God forbid we should…
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The Secret Jewish History of McDonald’s
There’s more than meets the eye in the title of “The Founder,” the new biopic of Ray Kroc. For while Kroc carefully cultivated his image as “the founder” of McDonald’s, two brothers named McDonald invented their namesake restaurant chain. By the time Kroc — a traveling salesman played by Michael Keaton in the film —…
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What Netflix’s ‘Bojack Horseman’ Tells Us About Assimilation
‘BoJack Horseman,’ Netflix’s animated comedy featuring an anthropomorphic celebrity horse, is about the American crisis of authenticity. BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) is a washed-up sitcom actor who lives in a dystopian Hollywood where Wolf Blitzer reports on supermarket scuffles and a resurrected J.D. Salinger is a game show writer. The protagonist wonders what he…
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How To Listen to Tchaikovsky While Looking Past His Anti-Semitism
When the conductor Semyon Bychkov arrived at a Russian-style cafe in midtown Manhattan to discuss the upcoming Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky festival at the New York Philharmonic, I handed the conductor a one-page document I’d found that morning that had unveiled a new Tchaikovsky for me. It summarized two boxes at the Columbia University Rare Book…
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The New York Jewish Film Festival, Jewish Women March, and More to Read, Watch, and Do This Weekend
If you require weekend plans, political and otherwise, the Forward has you covered. For new reads, look to Peter Hayes’ “Why? Explaining the Holocaust,” released this week, and Joseph Kertes’ novel of war and escape, released last week, “The Afterlife of Stars.” For lighter, faster reads, check out The New York Times Magazine’s profile of…
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How the Granddaughter of a Borscht Belt Waiter Became Roberta Peters, Opera Star
The enduring career of the American Jewish soprano Roberta Peters, who died on January 18 at age 86, shows that while not absolutely necessary, it helped if an opera singer’s grandfather was headwaiter at Grossinger’s in the Catskills. This Borscht Belt notability, father of Ruth Hirsch, a milliner, who had married Sol Peterman, a shoe…
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Why Donald Trump Makes Life So Difficult For His Translators
Translators are the ultimate close readers — they consider every word, every comma, and every layer of nuance. For months, “translator Twitter” has included comments from translators around the world on the difficulty of doing “Trumpslation.” One classic question translators asked each other: how to translate “Make America Great Again” into Spanish? The Spanish newspaper…
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How Art Spiegelman Is Paying Tribute to One of His Heroes
Si Lewen’s Parade: An Artist’s Odyssey Edited by Art Spiegelman Abrams Books, 148 pages, $40 It turns out that even cultural icons like taking pictures with their personal heroes, which is why when I visited Art Spiegelman at his Manhattan studio one damp morning early in January, the two of us spent 10 minutes trying…
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A Yiddish Theater Boom, and More of The Forward Looking Back
100 Years Ago There are currently 18 Yiddish theaters in America, and all of them are doing a bang-up business. This is in addition to the numerous Yiddish theater companies that are traveling around the country, performing in many different cities. There are five theaters in New York: Kessler’s, Shevski’s, People’s, Gabel’s and the Grand…
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What Does Trump’s Choice of Bibles Tell Us About Him?
President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he will be sworn in using both Lincoln’s Bible and his own family Bible, given to him by his mother. The Constitution doesn’t require that a Bible be used at all. The Bible aspect of the inauguration is all about symbolism, not law. Barack Obama chose Lincoln’s Bible for…
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