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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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Philanthropist Jacob Schiff was the keynote speaker at the opening ceremony for the Central Jewish Institute on East 85th Street. The theme of his speech was “Jews as Americans.” He argued that Jews must be Jewish in religion only. If Jews want to become part of general society, he argued, they…
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Why Christians Are Fleeing the Holy Lands
I gaze out over southern Jerusalem as the Catholic priest places the wafer on my tongue. Behind me Beit Jala covers the top of this steep hillside leading down to the Cremisan Valley. We stand among the old olive trees on the slope, six hundred feet below the town. The sun is about to set…
The Latest
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Why Lorraine Hansberry Called Her Play ‘Up Yours, Edward Albee’
Lorraine Hansberry, who died of pancreatic cancer at age 34, had two plays produced on Broadway in her lifetime. One was “A Raisin in the Sun,” her classic answer to the Langston Hughes question about a dream deferred. The New York Drama Critics Circle named “Raisin” the best American play of the 1958–59 season, and…
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Remembering Mell Lazarus, Creator of Miss Peach and Inspiration to Joseph Heller
Mell (born Melvin) Lazarus, the American Jewish cartoonist who died on May 24 at age 89, was more than just the creator of the long-running comic strips Miss Peach and Momma. Lazarus was also a novelist, whose fiction may have inspired his friend Joseph Heller, author of “Catch-22”. Lazarus had befriended Heller, a fan of…
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Why Do Anthony ‘Weiner’ and Eliot Spitzer Keep Coming Back for More?
In the spring of 2013, a disgraced governor and a disgraced congressman decided to play out their fantasies of redemption in front of the voters and reporters of New York City. Three years later, it’s getting harder and harder to explain why we let them. The governor, Eliot Spitzer, had been caught spending $15,000 on…
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What Yoda’s Yiddish Accent Has To Do With the ‘Are Jews a Race?’ Debate
(JTA) — Science has finally provided evidence of what Jewish “Star Wars” fans long suspected: Yoda is a member of the tribe — or at least he speaks like one. The bad news is the science has been widely dismissed as junk. The Yoda reference appears in a video in which a a 36-year-old Israeli…
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Opening a Treasure Trove of Kafka Trivia
Is That Kafka? 99 Finds By Reiner Stach Translate from the German by Kurt Beals New Directions, 352 pages, $27.95 In October of 1917, Franz Kafka received a letter: “Dear sir, You have made me unhappy,” it began. “I bought your ‘Metamorphosis’ and gave it to my cousin. But she doesn’t know how to make…
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Why We’re in a Golden Age For Israeli Cinema — And Politics Has Nothing To Do With It
Hugging the port of Cannes on either side of the Grand Palais du Festival is Village International, a colony of national pavilions, each promoting their own homegrown fare. This year, for the very first time in the history of the festival, Israel set up its own pavilion, right alongside China’s, whose red flag waged vigorously…
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Music When Watching Unbearable Tragedy Is Far Too Bearable — Especially When Ute Lemper Sings
‘I’m a mother of four children,” Ute Lemper was saying, fingers toying with the handle of her coffee cup, “and singing these songs, telling these terrible destinies and tales of death, is almost impossible.” Lemper sat across from me at Nice Matin, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The lunchtime conversations surrounding us hummed with an…
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My Name Is Bill Kristol — and How I Became a Renegade Jew
I’m a Renegade Jew. It didn’t start out that way. I was just an ordinary Jew, putting in my Jewish time, observing the Jewish calendar, mostly blowing off my Jewish responsibilities except for lip service to the faith on Yom Kippur and Passover. But I still did what I thought was right, for Judaism and…
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Meet the Man Who Knows How To Make a Show Work on Broadway
Few people know more about Broadway theater than Jack Viertel does. He comes at the form from all angles: He is the senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns and operates five Broadway theaters, and he’s the artistic director of the Encores! series at City Center. He’s been a theater critic, has worked on…
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