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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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…
The Latest
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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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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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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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Music Who Knew Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Son Is Revolutionizing World Music?
Jewish roots are emerging in contemporary music from remarkably diverse performers who are often not Jewish. Beyond the intriguing klezmer revival, there’s a steadily growing movement of typically classically trained musicians who are discovering mostly European Jewish music as a base for alchemical combinations of past and present. When classical guitarist Denis Azabagic, originally from…
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The Way Barbra Streisand Was — and How She Got That Way
Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power By Neal Gabler Yale University Press, 296 pages, $25 Barbra Streisand was born poor in Brooklyn. Her father died when she was a toddler; her mother was terrible to her, and her stepfather was worse. She was gawky, unpopular and unattractive. But she was determined, and she had…
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Art Remembering The Transcendent Meditations Of Eva Hesse
Only late in “Eva Hesse,” the new documentary about Eva Hesse’s art and her life, do we actually hear the artist’s voice. Part of an interview she gave to the art historian and writer Cindy Nemser, the audio recording is poignant, even haunting, given that by the time the transcript of the interview appeared as…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago American Jews are terribly upset over the death last week of the writer Sholem Aleichem. Those who live nearby mobbed his home in the Bronx to see the body of their most beloved writer. People arrived from as far away as Philadelphia, Boston and Toronto to pay their respects. From early…
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