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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Yes, Bob Dylan Writes Literature. Next Question?
Bob Dylan’s been a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature for many years, but I don’t think any of us really thought he’d ever win. Now that he has, the question remains, what’s left? He’s already won all the other awards – medals of honor and freedom from the American and French governments,…
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7 Bob Dylan Songs For Donald Trump
Donald Trump is president-elect. We thought you’d like to know what the bard might have to say about that. Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for literature did manage to take our minds off the political season, but only for a short while. Now that the excitement has died down, we’re back to politics as usual. And…
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Music How Twitter Responded to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize
For at least a moment or two, Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature set the world of Twitter abuzz. The announcement inspired a bevy of reactions. Some welcomed the choice as an acknowledgment that Dylan redefined what literature means in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Putting aside world & will now listen to…
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Paul Simon’s Secret Jewish Life
Modern klezmer music got its biggest boost in audience and record sales when, in the 1990s, classical violinist Itzhak Perlman rediscovered the music of his ancestors, got in touch with the leading lights of the revival, brought them with him to Poland to “find” the roots of the music, made a documentary, headlined an all-star…
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The Best and Worst Things About Bob Dylan Winning the Nobel Prize
Now that Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, we find this to be an appropriate time to consider the best and worst aspects of this amazing honor. THE BEST THINGS 1) It expands the definition of what constitutes great literature. 2) It vindicates all of us who suffered through the albums…
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How Oakland Turned Into a Heaven for Literary Translators
More than four hundred translators working in several dozen languages attended the American Literary Translators’ Association conference in Oakland this past weekend. The conference, known as ALTA, is probably the only event in America where you can go from a Russian translators’ dinner to a Kurdish-English poetry reading to a book fair consisting entirely of…
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How Poland’s Great Filmmaker Confronted His Country’s Holocaust History
In his films, the Polish director Andrzej Wajda, who died on October 9 at age 90, relentlessly investigated history, particularly his homeland’s treatment of Jews. In Wajda’s films such as “Samson” (1961), “Landscape After Battle,” (1970), “Wedding” (1972), “Promised Land,” (1975), “Korczak,” (1990) “Holy Week” (1995) and “Pan Tadeusz” (1999), Jews are included as main…
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How To Talk To Your Parents About the Trump Video: A Guide For Middle-Schoolers
First, remember that your parents might not want to bring up this subject because they don’t know how much you know. Approach them first. Talk to them when they’re relaxed, maybe after they’ve had a glass of wine or they’re getting ready to send you to bed and Netflix their favorite show. Second: Let them…
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Books Ferrante and the Freedom of the Jewish Woman Author
It’s neat, in a way, that Elena Ferrante’s Jewish. Well, not Ferrante—the author behind the pseudonym. Anita Raja, the Italian translator whom Claudio Gatti has convincingly argued is Elena Ferrante, is, as Gatti recently explained in detail in the New York Review of Books, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Whether we think it’s terrible…
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Was This Hippie Yenta the Zelig of Rock ‘n’ Roll?
Reading between the lines of the new documentary “Danny Says,” about music industry insider Danny Fields, it’s not quite clear if Fields was simply a Zelig of rock ‘n’ roll — linked in one way or another to the Beatles, the Doors, Cream, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, MC5, and the Ramones — or a phenomenal…
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How To Kill a Butterfly Like Elena Ferrante — or JT Leroy
What shocks me is not that someone was able to rip away the veil of privacy from the Italian writer known to the world as Elena Ferrante; nor am I surprised that she was able to maintain that anonymity for as long as she did. What startles me is the spectacle of people reporting this…
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