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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Isaac Mizrahi Hates Nostalgia But Loves His Mother
While I waited in the lobby of the Jewish Museum Tuesday for the press preview of “Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History,” I plotted how to get the designer’s autograph. The coffee table books titled “Isaac Mizrahi” by Chee Pearlman being sold in the gift shop looked expensive. There were only a few blank pages left…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago The Forward Association has decided to publish a larger Sunday edition than usual. It will contain twice as much reading material as a weekday Forverts, which costs 1 cent. The reading public has more time to read on Sunday and has demanded more. As a result, we have decided to provide…
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Can This Be Too Much Bock and Harnick for Our Own Good?
This has been our year of living Bock-Harnickly. In October, the York Theatre Company presented “Rothschild & Sons,” a revised take on composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick’s 1970 “The Rothschilds,” a dull tale about the founding of the banking dynasty. In December came Bartlett Sher’s triumphant revival of their masterwork, “Fiddler on the…
The Latest
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Film & TV ‘Familiar’ Characters Are African-American but the Sensibility Is Kinda Jewish
There is no curtain when you enter the theater for Danai Gurira’s “Familiar” at Playwrights Horizons. And so you get a good look, as you wait for the play to start, at its fully illuminated set, an idealized, cathedral-ceilinged suburban living space with smooth cream walls, dark-wood detailing and a towering bookcase. You know the…
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Puck Everlasting: The Stan Fischler Story
Stan Fischler loves his hokey jokes. “When my aunt made me hot chocolate, my uncle would say to me, ‘Stan, do you want some snoo with your chocolate?’ and of course I’d say, ‘What’s snoo?’ And he’d say: ‘Nothing. What’s snoo with you?’” Deadpan, Fischler turned to me. “Now ask me if I’m comfortable.” “Are…
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Film & TV Playwright Kenneth Lonergan’s Bible Belt Clash of Catholic Guilt and Jewish Anxiety
There’s a lesson in Kenneth Lonergan’s new play “Hold On To Me Darling,” which opened on Monday, March 14 at the Atlantic Theater Company. But I kind of doubt it’s the lesson the author intended. Lonergan is one of my favorite playwrights, which isn’t to say that he’s the author of my favorite plays. Like…
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Love in the Time of Viagra
Scary Old Sex: Stories By Arlene Heyman Bloomsbury USA, 240 pages, $26 In this era of energetically aging baby boomers and gauzy Viagra advertisements, discussing postmenopausal sex is not quite the taboo-shattering enterprise of yesteryear. But that fact doesn’t render Arlene Heyman’s debut short-story collection any less powerful or engaging. Heyman’s characters use sex to…
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Batman V. Superman, A Rabbi Weighs In
As the self proclaimed “comic book rabbi,” the question I hear more than any other is not Talmudic or Halachic but: “Who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman?” It’s a question fanboys (including me) have asked for generations. And it’s a question that we’re promised will finally be answered in Hollywood’s latest…
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The Moving Story of a 94-Year Old’s Deathbed Bar Mitzvah
Over the course of the past year, there were periods of warning that my husband, Marty, was beginning to suffer from dementia. An advanced mathematician, public school administrator and college professor, he was no longer able to do even simple math problems or play chess, his favorite pastime. In addition, his once robust appetite had…
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Leah Garrett on the Greatest Generation of American Novelists
Leah Garrett, author of “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel,” is great-great-granddaughter of Baruch Charney Vladeck, long-time manager of the Yiddish “Forverts.” She is professor of contemporary Jewish life and culture at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. An expert on Yiddish travel writing and the effect of Richard Wagner’s music on…
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Maya Plisetskaya’s Spirit Dances On
As Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet prepared for the first performance of its brief residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a gale-battered audience made its way to the doors. Speaking a mix of Russian and English and clad in an inordinate amount of fur, they came to pay homage to one of Russia’s premier ballet companies,…
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