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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Film & TV
How ‘The Birdcage’ Married Jewish and Gay Civil Rights
‘I see my tiger robe on television,” my mother says to me on the phone. “What am I watching?” I pause for a split second to think. I’m about 1,300 miles away from her. But I know: “The Birdcage.” My mother chuckles. She’s talking about the scene in the now iconic 1996 comedy where Robin…
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Primo Levi and the Italian Resistance
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy By Sergio Luzzatto; translated by Frederika Randall Metropolitan Books, 284 pages, $30 Poet, memoirist, essayist, novelist and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987) is best known as a cool-eyed survivor and chronicler of Auschwitz. But he was also briefly a Resistance fighter in the mountains of northwest Italy,…
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Music Why Ezra Furman Is Proudly Frum — and a ‘Dress-Wearing Weirdo’ at the Same Time
‘I really like Ezra Furman. I think the guy’s got something. He’s got a lot of wit and nerve.” That wasn’t a stray Facebook comment or online review. It was punk godfather Iggy Pop raving over newly minted indie-rock royalty on a BBC Music broadcast last month. The object of Pop’s adoration is a bisexual,…
The Latest
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Daughter of ‘British Schindler’ Recalls Dad’s Humanity
In 1939, Sir Nicholas Winton was a 29-year-old London stockbroker with a seemingly impossible plan. He was going to save hundreds of Czechoslovakian children from the Nazis — and he wasn’t going to get caught. Nine months later, more than 600 children had been transported to safety under the watch of the so-called “British Schindler.” It…
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Art No Jews Please, We’re British
It was, as it should be, dark and damp when I arrived one night in the tiny village of Great Tew, at the northeastern edge of the Cotswolds. A British investment banker I know in New York had recommended eating at the Falkland Arms, a quintessential English pub, he said. And sure enough, there were…
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Film & TV Remembering Abe Vigoda, Big-Screen Gangster, TV Detective and Real-Life Mensch
The joyous, life-enhancing aspect of Abe Vigoda, the performer of Russian Jewish origin who died at age 94 on January 26, was reminding us that good acting creates an image different from reality. Beloved for such roles as the moribund, hunched-over Detective Fish in the TV sitcom “Barney Miller” and pranked by “People Magazine” which…
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My Long Journey From Anatevka to ‘Fiddler’ on Broadway
Editor’s Note: To prepare for his role as Motel the tailor in the critically acclaimed Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” actor Adam Kantor traveled to Eastern Europe in search of the world of Sholem Aleichem. What follows is an account of his travels and how they’ve changed his perception of the musical and…
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Say Hello to ‘Mr. Yiddish’
King of Yiddish By Curt Leviant Livingston Press, 305 pages, $30 When Shmulik Weingarten arrived in Israel in 1950, authorities in higher education discreetly advised him to change his name. As the narrator of Curt Leviant’s novel “King of Yiddish” tells us, “Even though all the founding fathers of Israel were born into that supple,…
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The True Story of How Nazis Invented the Space Program
Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA By Amy Shira Teitel Bloomsbury Sigma, 304 pages, $27 In theory, science is a perfectly objective realm. Its ideal is the impersonal pursuit of knowledge, its goal to describe the world as it is. To paraphrase the late New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan,…
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How Pastrami Helped To Create American Jewish Culture
Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli By Ted Merwin NYU Press, 256 pages, $26.95 I have always loved the theater, because no matter how many years of confuting experience intervene, Pavlovian associations lead me to expect that corned beef sandwiches at the 2nd Ave Deli will follow every play in New…
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How I Relieved Myself Through Prayer
My brother was trying to decide if a friend of mine was too religious for him to date. We were both in our teens then. I had no idea how he defined “too religious.” “Just tell me,” he said. “Is she the kind that says that weird blessing when she comes out of the bathroom?”…
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