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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The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote and Miguel de Cervantes
April 22 marked the 400th anniversary of the death of the Spanish novelist and playwright Miguel de Cervantes, who was likely born into a family of conversos, Spanish Jews forced in 1492 to convert to Christianity or leave their homeland. Jewish themes have been discerned by some readers in Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.” In time to…
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Will Isaac Newton Survive the Second Coming of Levi-mania?
It wasn’t just that the novel’s prologue seems to feature Sir Isaac Newton in a romantic liaison with a young Italian man that caught my attention. Since his last published novel, Jonathan Levi has co-founded a high school in New York City, rearranged the elementary school libraries of New York City, written a major piece…
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How Great Adventure Goes All-In Orthodox for Passover
(JTA) — Pinchas Cohen spent most of Monday wandering around Six Flags Great Adventure under a blazing sun, wearing a knee-length black coat and carrying a big box of shmura matzah under his arm. An imposing, Russian-born Chabad-Lubavitch Hasid who now lives in Brooklyn, Cohen came to this amusement park in New Jersey with his…
The Latest
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Who Should Replace James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera?
The Metropolitan Opera press release dated April 14 stating that long-time music director James Levine is retiring at age 72 due to health issues — without even a perfunctory quote from the departing maestro himself — has left all opera fans agog at the possibilities of who may be hired for the job. No one…
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History of ‘Game of Thrones’
“Game of Thrones,” the popular medieval fantasy series that one of its creators describes as “‘The Sopranos’ in Middle-earth” — a reference to that other medieval fantasy saga written by a guy with too many R’s in his name, JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” — is full of intrigue and drama, as well as…
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My Lower East Side Neighbor Caught Adolf Eichmann
For a long time, when I was growing up in the building I still live in on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I knew one neighbor only as Peter. Tall, bronzed and muscled, Peter lived on the 13th floor. If I was riding the elevator alone with him, he always said, “Hello, how’s your mother?” in…
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Q&A — Michael Chabon Talks Occupation, Injustice and Literature After Visit to West Bank
The author Michael Chabon was on a tour of Hebron in the West Bank when he met an unexpected fan in a nearby group of Israeli soldiers on duty in the divided city. “I’ve actually read your books,” one young soldier said, recognizing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.”…
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Could Nathan the Wise Really Be the Second Greatest Jewish Character Ever?
When I studied in London, I frequently ran into street vendors selling black-and-white photographs of standard city scenes – a telephone booth, Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey – in which a single detail, like a bus or street sign, would be colored red, a shock amongst the sedate. Sometimes the result was lovely, but more frequently…
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Chanan Tigay’s Mad Search for the World’s Oldest Bible
The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible By Chanan Tigay Ecco, 368 pages, $27.99 Before Bedouins discovered the first Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1947 in a cave near the Dead Sea, another ancient manuscript briefly enraptured the archaeological community and promised to transform biblical scholarship. The find in question was…
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Music A Jewish Tribute to Prince, Holy Unifier of Spirit and Sex
We get older when those we love — first parents, then peers and friends — pass away. Death becomes real, not an abstraction. Not only can it happen anytime; it does happen anytime. I think that’s true when celebrities pass also. This year, Prince and David Bowie; not long ago, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston….
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Setting Aside a Moment for the Uprising
Because the first night of Passover in 1943 was also the first night of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, many Seder observers set time aside the first night to commemorate its heroic martyrs. Although it’s a tradition that has passed out of fashion, it still remains strong within the Yiddish community. As we celebrate a festival…
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