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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Puck Everlasting: The Stan Fischler Story
Stan Fischler loves his hokey jokes. “When my aunt made me hot chocolate, my uncle would say to me, ‘Stan, do you want some snoo with your chocolate?’ and of course I’d say, ‘What’s snoo?’ And he’d say: ‘Nothing. What’s snoo with you?’” Deadpan, Fischler turned to me. “Now ask me if I’m comfortable.” “Are…
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Film & TV Playwright Kenneth Lonergan’s Bible Belt Clash of Catholic Guilt and Jewish Anxiety
There’s a lesson in Kenneth Lonergan’s new play “Hold On To Me Darling,” which opened on Monday, March 14 at the Atlantic Theater Company. But I kind of doubt it’s the lesson the author intended. Lonergan is one of my favorite playwrights, which isn’t to say that he’s the author of my favorite plays. Like…
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Love in the Time of Viagra
Scary Old Sex: Stories By Arlene Heyman Bloomsbury USA, 240 pages, $26 In this era of energetically aging baby boomers and gauzy Viagra advertisements, discussing postmenopausal sex is not quite the taboo-shattering enterprise of yesteryear. But that fact doesn’t render Arlene Heyman’s debut short-story collection any less powerful or engaging. Heyman’s characters use sex to…
The Latest
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Batman V. Superman, A Rabbi Weighs In
As the self proclaimed “comic book rabbi,” the question I hear more than any other is not Talmudic or Halachic but: “Who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman?” It’s a question fanboys (including me) have asked for generations. And it’s a question that we’re promised will finally be answered in Hollywood’s latest…
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The Moving Story of a 94-Year Old’s Deathbed Bar Mitzvah
Over the course of the past year, there were periods of warning that my husband, Marty, was beginning to suffer from dementia. An advanced mathematician, public school administrator and college professor, he was no longer able to do even simple math problems or play chess, his favorite pastime. In addition, his once robust appetite had…
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Leah Garrett on the Greatest Generation of American Novelists
Leah Garrett, author of “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel,” is great-great-granddaughter of Baruch Charney Vladeck, long-time manager of the Yiddish “Forverts.” She is professor of contemporary Jewish life and culture at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. An expert on Yiddish travel writing and the effect of Richard Wagner’s music on…
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Maya Plisetskaya’s Spirit Dances On
As Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet prepared for the first performance of its brief residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a gale-battered audience made its way to the doors. Speaking a mix of Russian and English and clad in an inordinate amount of fur, they came to pay homage to one of Russia’s premier ballet companies,…
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Zionist Dreams and Realities Collide in New Documentary
“How do you reform yourself,” the playwright Motti Lerner asks, “after you’ve been broken?” That’s the first question posed in Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky’s new documentary “Colliding Dreams.” Lerner is talking about the Hebrew word tikkun, which translates roughly to “rectification” and signifies an ancient Jewish focus on the reparation of the world. It’s…
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Film & TV Sacha Baron Cohen’s Long Journey From Anatevka to ‘Grimsby’
For the loudest person in the room, Sacha Baron Cohen took a while to find his public voice. Or voices. From the time we met as 16-year-olds, through our college years and while we lived together, Sacha was always the center of attention and always the funniest person around. But people underestimate his commitment to…
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Dr. Strangelove’s Jewish Set Designer Dies at 95
Ken Adam, the German Jewish motion picture production designer who won immortality for conceiving the sets for James Bond films in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as well as the Pentagon War Room in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), proved that fantasy can heal historical wounds. Born Klaus Hugo Adam, he died on March 10 at age…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Boris Thomashefsky is currently playing the role of Piterknap, the poor coalman, in the production of Avraham Shomer’s “Der Griner Milyoner” (“The Immigrant Millionaire”) at the National Theater, in New York City. His character sells coal from a pushcart, is dirt poor, dresses shabbily, scarfs down pickles and tells crude jokes…
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