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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Music
Leonard Cohen, ‘Master of Erotic Despair’ Takes His Leave
Rock-poet Leonard Cohen, the “master of erotic despair” and the writer of dozens of modern classics that have been performed and recorded by everyone from John Cale to Judy Collins, Willie Nelson, U2 and Rufus Wainwright, died on November 7, at age 82. The official announcement was made on November 10 after a private funeral….
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You Wanted It Darker? Leonard Cohen Just Passed Away.
Leonard Cohen passed away on November 7 at the age of 82, it was announced on November 10. His influence over half a century was phenomenal. He will be missed. Tributes are already pouring in, including tweets from Bette Midler, Mia Farrow and Marc Maron. Leonard Cohen has died. Another magical voice stilled. — Bette…
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Music How a Troubadour Daniel Toledano Is Reconnecting With His Sephardic Heritage
With his long, curly hair, his amber medallion and a guitar strapped onto his shoulder, Dani Toledano looks like a troubadour just about to recite an elegy. In fact, he works for Ragonis Tours, an Israeli company that helps groups of visitors discover the Jewish past of Toledo, Spain. In a quiet square of the…
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How To Vote in Other Languages — Including Yiddish
Voting early in Chicago, where the lines were long and snaking around the Edgewater Library stacks, I received a receipt printed in four languages — English, Spanish, Hindi, and Vietnamese. I immediately wondered about languages not listed but certainly heard in this zip code, one of the most diverse in America, and home to refugees…
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Some of William F. Buckley Jr.’s Best Friends Were Jewish — Really
The degree to which the conservative editor and commentator William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review magazine and TV’s “Firing Line,” was inspired by contacts with Jewish contemporaries may not be fully known to those outside his circle of friends and political foes. Buckley, who died in 2008, is honored with “A Torch Kept…
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Amos Oz, Israel’s Greatest Writer, Delivers Another Masterpiece at Age 77
Judas By Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $25 Considering how often fellow Israelis have called him a “traitor” (from his early involvement in Peace Now to his recent comparison of violent West Bank settlers to neo-Nazis, which earned him death threats), it should hardly surprise anyone that Amos…
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How My Hebrew School Teacher Taught Me Who To Vote For on Election Day
My kindergarten teacher at Yeshiva Central Queens was not modern—Mora Ruth had obvious favorites, stared at us while we ate lunch, called us made-up names, and totally let us do gross things like sniff each other’s tushies. I loved her. The only thing I didn’t like about Kindergarten, back in 1969, was that if you…
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Film & TV Revisiting ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ in an Era of Identity Politics
“There’s no way to tear open the secret heart of another human being,” Phillip Green (Gregory Peck) laments in the 1947 movie “Gentleman’s Agreement.” Phil can’t figure out how to do a story on anti-Semitism absent “the drool of statistics and protest.” But he finds a fresh angle on an old issue by living as…
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Well, This Certainly Must Be the Best Backgammon Novel Ever Written
A Gambler’s Anatomy By Jonathan Lethem Doubleday, 304 pages, $27.95 ‘A Gambler’s Anatomy,” Jonathan Lethem’s 10th novel, has a promisingly madcap premise: Alexander Bruno, dashing and suave (“He’d been told he resembled Roger Moore, or the bass player from Duran Duran”), hustles a living as an itinerant backgammon player, relieving overly rich, overly confident “whales”…
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A Trip Back to a New York Where Everyone Was Jewish and Gay
‘Gay Gotham,” the landmark new show at the Museum of the City of New York, doesn’t directly address the Jewish experience. But culture impresario Lincoln Kirstein and maestro Leonard Bernstein, are among the ten figures the exhibit explores. “Through both men, we tell different stories about just how ‘out’ artists could be in that period…
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Why Serial Killers and Jewish Pirates Fascinate Josh Zeman
On November 5, “The Killing Season,” a docu-series about the unsolved case of the Long Island Serial Killer (LISK), premieres on A&E. Documentarian Josh Zeman, born in Seacliff, Long Island, became fascinated with these unsolved killings since the bodies of 10 sex workers were discovered along a desolate highway on Gilgo Beach, LI in 2010…
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