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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Remembering Marni Nixon, the Greatest Ghost Singer
Marni Nixon, who died on July 24 at 86, was more than just the off-screen dubbed singing voice for unmusical actresses in such Hollywood movies as “The King and I,” “West Side Story,” and “My Fair Lady.” A marriage with the screen composer Ernest Gold (born Ernst Goldner), who wrote the soundtrack music to “Exodus,”…
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What Rembrandt Painted When He Painted Jews
Prior to 1629, when the 23-year-old Rembrandt painted “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” the scene, the culmination of the biblical episode long associated with anti-Semitism that has come to epitomize greediness and selling out, had been treated only a handful of times in art. The narrative, which appears only in the book of…
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Here Are the Top 10 New Yiddish Words
The Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, edited by Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath and Paul Glasser, is full not only of familiar words but a smattering of new ones as well. We picked our top ten favorite Yiddish neologisms. Designated Driver = der nikhterer shofer Hate Crime = der sine-farbrekhn Printer = der opdruker Flip-Flops = fingershikh Jabbing Pain =…
The Latest
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The Secret Jewish History of Stanley Kubrick
For the first time since it embarked on an international tour, “Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition” is showing at a Jewish museum. San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum proves to be an awesome setting for a complicated, Jewish artist whose films continue to entertain, haunt and provoke. Few filmmakers have been parsed, praised and criticized as much…
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Here’s the Only English-Yiddish Dictionary You Need
Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary Edited by Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath and Paul Glasser Dr. Chava Lapin, associate editor Indiana University Press and the League for Yiddish, 856 pages, $60 It isn’t easy being a language without a country. Unlike English, Hebrew and hundreds of other languages that have governments to protect them and nurture their growth, Yiddish has,…
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Logan Lerman’s Journey From Percy Jackson to Philip Roth
Percy Jackson is not dead. He’s in a coma, and not likely to survive — at least in film — but where there’s life, there’s hope. This according to Logan Lerman, the 24-year-old star of the two popular Percy Jackson films, “The Lightning Thief” and “Sea of Monsters.” Since then, Lerman has established himself as…
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Photographer Nan Goldin Dares You To Look
The first moment that really gets me comes when the strains of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” start, Nico’s voice scratching over the already scratched surfaces of the pictures. It’s a little cheesy, maybe, this song about reflecting another’s innermost self laid over a montage of photographed images of people glancing at themselves, but so what?…
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Hillary Clinton’s Chief Strategist Has a Surprisingly Theatrical Jewish Past
Something theatrical is afoot in the Jewish wing of the Democratic party. In March, we learned that Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland — in case you’ve missed the breaking news, he’s still waiting for the Senate to acknowledge his existence — had tried his hand at theater reviewing while he was a student at Harvard….
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Indignant Philip Roth Film Oozes With Yearning and Nostalgia
The title “Indignation” doesn’t suggest a movie about nostalgia. But “Indignation,” directed by James Schamus and based the 2008 novel by Philip Roth, is about nostalgia in its purest form — about the way time slips through our fingers, about the bittersweet solace of memory, and about how every choice has unforeseen and irreversible consequences….
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The Secret Loneliness of Art Collector Rhoda Pritzker
The Yale Center for British Art has just reopened after an extensive building conservation project. On the fourth floor is Paul Mellon’s British art collection, and on the third floor, now through August 21, is the opening exhibition, “Modernism and Memory, Rhoda Pritzker and the Art of Collecting.” Seventy-two paintings, drawings and sculptures were gifted…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Socialists Need Not Apply Socialists are treyf for the New York City Board of Education, but bribes are apparently kosher. We know this because a local schoolteacher named Gabriel Simon, a well-known socialist active on the Lower East Side, recently took the exam to become a principal and scored the highest…
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