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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EXCLUSIVE: Tony-Winning Playwright Richard Greenberg Talks Baseball, Movies, Ferrante and Obscurity
Long, long ago in the era before the dawn of Trump, I ran a theater company in Chicago where I developed an infatuation with the plays of Richard Greenberg. I first encountered his work on his adaptation of Laurie Colwin’s story “Ask Me Again” on PBS’s “American Playhouse.” There was something so charming, smart and…
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An Ambitious Book Helps Jews Navigate the Complexities of Going Home
This was originally in the print edition of February 20, 1998, and was posted online in December 2016. For some people, going home is a complicated matter — particularly after a long absence. But while some journeys of return are fraught with deep emotion and ambivalence, others are more like an odyssey, an obstacle course…
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Susan Faludi’s ‘In The Darkroom’ Named To NYT 10 Best Books Of 2016
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi’s “In The Darkroom,” a memoir about her father — who, after 25 years of estrangement, contacted her in 2004 to inform her of his sex reassignment surgery — has been named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 2016. Explaining the selection, the editors of The…
The Latest
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Music One of the Greatest Rock and Roll Songs of All Time was Inspired by a Jewish Bookseller
One of the Band’s most enigmatic yet best-known songs is “The Weight.” It’s in the Top 50 of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”; in the Top 15 of Pitchfork’s “Best Songs of the Sixties”; and one of the “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll,” according to the Rock and Roll Hall…
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‘She Loves Me’ Hits The Screen, And 8 Other Things To Read, Watch, And Do This Week
We hope you’ve digested all of that Turkey Day tryptophan, because with a flood of events in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles, the Jewish cultural world is moving right along. As December creeps around the corner, bundle against the cold – or, if you’re in L.A., laugh at the rest of us…
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How The Klezmatics Changed Music — and My Life
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the Klezmatics changed my life. Somehow I made my way to the Knitting Factory nightclub in downtown Manhattan in April 1997 to see the album release concert for the Klezmatics’ album “Possessed.” I was there in part as a music critic of 15 years’ standing, and partly out…
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Film & TV Did Woody Allen Predict Donald Trump in ‘Bananas’?
Donald Trump’s elevation to the White House has inspired two apparently contradictory sentiments among liberals. The first is a skittishness about the future of democratic institutions and constitutional rights. The second is a desire to escape, in both a literal and figurative sense — hightail it to Canada or avoid the homepage of The New…
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WATCH TONIGHT: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Pays Tribute To Elie Wiesel
At 5:30 pm EST today, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will live-stream its tribute to the late Elie Wiesel. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor, whose work as an advocate for Holocaust remembrance continues to shape worldwide discourse on genocide, passed away on July 2. “He was a transformative figure who exemplified…
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“Jersey Boys” Writers Found Guilty of Copyright Infringement
According to an article in Forbes, Marshall Brickman (who has collaborated with Woody Allen) and Rick Elice, the two co-authors of hit Broadway musical “Jersey Boys,” and show director Des McAnuff were all found guilty this week of copyright infringement by a Nevada federal jury. The jury decided that 10% of the show’s success could…
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Paul Krassner Celebrates Abbie Hoffman’s 80th and Remembers Dropping Acid With Groucho
On November 30, fans of 1960s counterculture commemorate what would have been the 80th birthday of the American Jewish activist and anarchist Abbie Hoffman, who died in 1989. Hoffman was a cofounder of the Youth International Party, whose adherents were called Yippies, alongside Jerry Rubin (1938 –1994), Nancy Kurshan (born 1944), and Paul Krassner (born…
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Three Crazy Ways That Israelis Have Desecrated Their Flag
Earlier yesterday morning, Donald Trump tweeted that he would like to outlaw the burning of the American flag. We wrote an article about the tweet that detailed the long and unsuccessful history of American flag burning legislation as well as the Israeli flag desecration laws and their recent ramp up in severity (among other changes,…
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