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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A ‘Golden’ Trip Back to the World of Yiddish Theater
When Jacob Pavlovich Adler — a founding father of New York City’s Yiddish Theater District and one of its greatest stars — died in 1926, The New York Times estimated that between 100,000 and 500,000 mourners lined the streets for his funeral. The turnout was likely even greater than that, in the same year, for…
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Recipes Ottolenghi Nails Haute Cuisine in ‘NOPI’
This is an occasional column in which the writer evaluates a new cookbook by making some of its recipes, sharing the dishes with friends and asking her guests what they think of the results. She recently cooked her way through “NOPI: The Cookbook” (Ten Speed Press) by Yotam Ottolenghi and Ramael Scully. Related “NOPI” Pistachio…
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Remembering Lillian Vernon, the Jewish Queen of Catalogues
The song “Sugar Daddy” from John Cameron Mitchell’s musical “Hedwig & The Angry Inch” extols the thrills of sponsored shopping: “a Waterpik, a Cuisinart/ and a hypo-allergenic dog./ I want all the luxuries of the modern age,/ and every item on every page/ in the Lillian Vernon catalogue.” Like Hedwig, much of America kvelled from…
The Latest
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My Yearly Jewish Breakdown
The first time I broke down, I was walking along the Thames in London with my friend David. It was early on in our five-week backpacking trip, and we started debating the authenticity of the Torah. I said that it didn’t matter to me whether God literally gave Moshe the tablets on Mount Sinai —…
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The secret Jewish history of ‘Star Wars’
In a 2012 interview, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas made the feeble claim that the release of another episode in his now-38-year-old sci-fi franchise is “not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie.” Needless to say, such a remark merely fans the flames of devotion accorded to…
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Remembering Dolph Schayes, the Greatest Jewish Basketball Player Ever
Yes, of course Dolph Schayes was a legendary pro basketball player—as most of the stories noted following his death last week at the age of 87, probably the greatest Jewish basketball player in history. But although I was a sportswriter for more than 40 years with The New York Times, I met him only once….
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Jeffrey Tambor Discovers What it Means to be a Yiddishe Mame in ‘Transparent’
There are more than a few songs that pay homage to the Ashkenazi Jewish mother. They’re schmaltzy, but if you’ve half a brain and any measure of experience, you can taste the irony like the tang in Canter’s coleslaw. Two of my favorites: “A Yiddishe mame, is there anything better in the world […] Oy…
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Music How Evgeny Kissin Became a One-Man Yiddish Pride Movement
In a poem Evgeny Kissin wrote in Yiddish, he looks forward to the Jewish program he’s set to perform on December 16 at Carnegie Hall: In Kenedi-Tsenter af yidish hob ikh shoyn geshalt, / un opgeshatst hobm es hoykh i a yid, i a goy / Kh’vel es ton in kumendikn yor oykh in Karnegi…
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Jewish Psychics of the Lower East Side — and Why We Need Them
I usually fall into the cynic camp when it comes to psychics or any sort of mystical readers. Or at least I used to. In July, I visited a reader named Monte Farber in East Hampton. He was a source for a story I was writing, and I dropped by to introduce myself. He operates…
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Should Baruch Spinoza Be Brought Back Into Jewish Fold — 350 Years Later?
(JTA) — More than 350 years after this city’s Portuguese Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza and banned his writings for eternity, the philosopher’s books are for sale at the souvenir shop of the community’s synagogue. Spinoza, a Dutch-born Jewish philosopher who laid the intellectual foundations of the Enlightenment and is sometimes referred to as history’s…
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Pierre Birnbaum on the ‘Israel-ization’ of French Jews
The French Jewish political sociologist and historian Pierre Birnbaum, born in 1940, is an emeritus professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. His books include ; “Jewish Destinies”; and “The Idea of France” and “Two Houses: Essay on the Citizenship of Jews (in France and the USA)” His most recent work, “The Confusions of a Government Jester,” applies…
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