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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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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A Psychedelic Pippi Longstocking Creates Art So Beautiful It Hurts
Sometimes, going to see an art exhibit can feel like a religious experience; other times, that feeling comes only after you get a chance to leave. This came to mind the other day, after I attended the opening of the Pipilotti Rist retrospective at the New Museum, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. If…
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New Series Forthcoming From Matthew Weiner, Creator of ‘Mad Men’
In yet another win for online entertainment, Matthew Weiner, the Jewish creator of “Mad Men,” has confirmed that he will be creating a new show for Amazon and the Weinstein Company. Since the end of Mad Men’s seven season run (or eight, depending on how you parse it), Weiner has kept busy with a number…
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Books Trump’s Literary Accomplishments, Assessed
Samantha Bee offers up the not-implausible possibility that Donald Trump can’t read. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post has the scoop on a novel Trump had gotten ghostwritten, but that no longer bears his byline. It’s “an incredibly sexist novel,” according to HuffPo’s Todd Van Luling. Were we expecting it to be any other kind? Phoebe Maltz…
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How We Tracked Down the Best Yiddish Stories of the Past Century — and More
‘Jews say that if you change where you live you’ll change your luck, but is America really that different?” That’s the first line of an excerpt from Abraham Cahan’s “The Additional Soul,” a story that, translated to English from Yiddish by Jordan Kutzik, appears in the new anthology, “Have I Got a Story For You:…
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How a Jewish Photographer Named Herman Leonard Redefined Jazz
Few people did more to establish jazz’s visual aesthetic than the American Jewish photographer Herman Leonard, who passed away in 2010. Leonard began photographing jazz musicians in the 1940s, often offering club owners and musicians free prints in exchange for access to rehearsal studios. His photographs appeared sporadically in issues of DownBeat and Metronome magazines,…
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“First Jewish Americans” Were Anxious About Intermarriage, Assimilation — Just Like Us
In 1742 Phila Levy-Franks, the daughter of a well-off family in New York’s growing Jewish community, secretly married the Huguenot Oliver de Lancey. Her mother, Abigail, who had immigrated to the United States from England in 1695, went into mourning and never spoke to her again. It might be harder, now, to find Jewish parents…
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The World’s Oldest Jewish Actor Dies at 101
The Russian Jewish actor Vladimir Zeldin, who died at age 101 on October 31, proved that if a performing career is long enough, it can stretch from one dictatorship to another. A mainstay of Moscow’s Red Army Theatre, now known as the Russian Army Theatre, Zeldin’s powerful presence and resonant voice filled this vast, crushingly…
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These Were 10 of the Greatest Artists on Jewish-Owned Chess Records Label
Chess Records, established in Chicago in 1950, was one of American music’s major institutions, helping to establish the hot, electric Chicago Blues sound and pioneer a new type of music known as Rock n’ Roll. Phil and Leonard Chess, brothers and co-founders of the label, were immigrants from a Jewish community in Częstochowa, Poland. After…
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