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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Kinky Friedman Rides Again
Kinky Friedman’s got big boots. Size 10.5. Black cowboy jobs with Texas dust in the cracks. And points sharp enough to catch the hook of a song, of which Friedman’s got plenty: “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” “Rapid City, South Dakota,” “Ride ’Em Jewboy.” In October he’ll have a few more to add…
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Film & TV Jewish King of Latin TV Says ‘Adios’ After 53 Years
(JTA) — On Saturday, the Spanish language television network Univision will host the final broadcast of “Sábado Gigante.” With 53 years on TV, the world’s longest-running variety show is an eclectic, strange mashup of a game show, a talk show and live entertainment. There are singing competitions — the poor-performing contestants are eliminated by a…
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How Marlon Brando Became Godfather to the Jews
Shortly into “Listen to Me Marlon,” a fascinating new documentary about Marlon Brando spoken almost completely in his own voice, comes a startling glimpse of Brando’s life-changing plunge into the Jewish experience of the 20th century. Drawn largely from diaristic audio tapes he made, combined with a wide range of cinematic imagery, the ruminations start…
The Latest
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Why I Donated My Eggs at 21
‘When you turn 21, then you can do what you want,” my mother said over and over again. While most of my friends were counting down for tattoos and piercings that would “make the neighbors talk,” I was waiting for the day I would be able to help a couple have a baby. I still…
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Where We Found Respite From Discrimination
No sooner have we taken our summer vacation than some of us have begun to plan the next one. Where we go and what we see are determined by any number of factors, from the flexibility of our calendars to the elasticity of our budgets. One thing, though, that no longer affects our choice of…
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Blowing the Shofar in Cairo
‘Have you ever prepared a Jewish body for burial?” It was Saturday morning, April 13, 2013. The person on the line had called me hours earlier to let me know that Carmen Weinstein, leader of Cairo’s Jewish community, had died. I had arrived in Cairo nearly eight months earlier to work at the U.S. Embassy,…
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Music How Michael Alpert Brought Klezmer Into the 21st Century
The scent of herring; owlish spectacles; dusty, tragedy-laden archives; scratchy vinyl records you wouldn’t want your friends to know about — these are the things one sometimes associates with Yiddish culture. For more than three decades, Michael Alpert has worked hard on preserving and reviving an Eastern European Jewish tradition that is precisely the opposite…
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Music Soundtrack of Our Spirit: The Podcast
Readers have been calling and emailing us, asking for a podcast version of our playlist so they can listen to it in yet more situations — even on those infrequent occasions when they can’t stream the playlist from here. So we heard you and put together a single podcast with our top five songs and…
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Patrick Stewart Bluntly Channels a Jewish Writer’s Sensibility
I don’t know if “Blunt Talk,” the new comedy on Starz starring Patrick Stewart as a disaster-prone news anchor, is any good. But I do know that I like it. The show is strange and manic, and has a lot of witty lines about the Falklands War. It also has weak dialogue and contrived plot…
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Books ‘Eating Delancey’ — and Enjoying Every Morsel
— what a super name for a book. I’ve had this relatively new volume by Aaron Rezny and Jordan Schaps on my desk for a little while now, and I keep dipping back into it because it’s so rich in delicious tidbits about the Jewish foodways of New York’s Lower East Side. It’s kind of…
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Film & TV Theo Bikel Sang ‘Hava Nagila’ During a Hijacking, And Other Stories From Sue Mengers’ Epic Life
Did you cry during “Love Story”? Sing along to “Funny Girl”? Swoon over “The Way We Were”? For that, and a lot more, you can thank Sue Mengers. Before this badass lady came along, talent agents were basically baby-sitters to the stars: you tried to keep them in line, and if that failed, you prayed…
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