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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Isn’t There Someone Out There Who Wants To Buy Alan Dershowitz’s Judaica?
I have to preface this story by admitting that I did not know who Alan Dershowitz was until about a month ago. (Hi, Alan.) I was writing a different article for this newspaper, about the collection of the Valmadonna, a famous Judaica library broken up and sold in pieces, and I was speaking with an…
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Remembering Geoffrey Hartman — Wordsworthian, Critic and Holocaust Scholar
“Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” wrote William Wordsworth, one of Geoffrey Hartman’s beloved Romantics. “Shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing boy.” For Hartman, in 2010 proclaimed by his Yale colleague Paul Fry to be “arguably the finest Wordsworth critic who has ever written,” those lines from “Ode on Intimations of…
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Purim and Encounters With Bigotry — Including Our Own
Some time ago, I came across the Twitter feed of a prominent American Jewish writer in which I noticed several disparaging remarks about ultra-Orthodox Jews, with liberal use of words like “parasites,” “psycho Haredim” and other choice denigrations. Whoa, I thought, that’s a bit harsh, and I tweeted at the writer, saying so. Another writer,…
The Latest
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The strange and violent history of the ordinary grogger
Some 19th-century groggers are constructed to allow users to hang Haman over and over again
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Video: In Hamburg, Muslim Girls Sing a Yiddish Song
A version of this article first appeared in Yiddish in the Forverts. In Hamburg, Germany, a group of five 14-year old girls, most of them from Muslim Turkish homes, recently interviewed a Yiddish folksinger and even learned a Yiddish song themselves. The activity was part of Geschichtomat, a project that encourages eighth-graders in this north…
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Isaac Mizrahi Hates Nostalgia But Loves His Mother
While I waited in the lobby of the Jewish Museum Tuesday for the press preview of “Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History,” I plotted how to get the designer’s autograph. The coffee table books titled “Isaac Mizrahi” by Chee Pearlman being sold in the gift shop looked expensive. There were only a few blank pages left…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago The Forward Association has decided to publish a larger Sunday edition than usual. It will contain twice as much reading material as a weekday Forverts, which costs 1 cent. The reading public has more time to read on Sunday and has demanded more. As a result, we have decided to provide…
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Can This Be Too Much Bock and Harnick for Our Own Good?
This has been our year of living Bock-Harnickly. In October, the York Theatre Company presented “Rothschild & Sons,” a revised take on composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick’s 1970 “The Rothschilds,” a dull tale about the founding of the banking dynasty. In December came Bartlett Sher’s triumphant revival of their masterwork, “Fiddler on the…
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Film & TV ‘Familiar’ Characters Are African-American but the Sensibility Is Kinda Jewish
There is no curtain when you enter the theater for Danai Gurira’s “Familiar” at Playwrights Horizons. And so you get a good look, as you wait for the play to start, at its fully illuminated set, an idealized, cathedral-ceilinged suburban living space with smooth cream walls, dark-wood detailing and a towering bookcase. You know the…
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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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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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