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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Welcome to Arthur Miller’s Nightmare
“And if I seem to tell this like a dream,” says the lawyer who serves as narrator, as the play reaches its brutal resolution, “it was that way.” The lawyer is Alfieri, our guide through postwar Red Hook in Arthur Miller’s 1955 classic, “A View From the Bridge.” And in the production that opened last…
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Film & TV The Jewish Education of an African Cinema Master
The great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, chose cinema as his primary medium almost by default. A former dock worker who is now affectionately referred to as the “father of African cinema,” Sembene had already published several successful novels when he decided, at the age of 40,…
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Film & TV The Nazi Plot Against America Revisited
Counterfactual speculation about the Third Reich is at an all-time high. In recent weeks, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has claimed that German Jews could have resisted the Nazis more effectively if they had enjoyed access to guns. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that Adolf Hitler never would have ordered the murder of…
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Remembering André Glucksmann, a Man of Courage and Conviction
After a long struggle with cancer, the French intellectual André Glucksmann died this week in Paris at the age of 78. With his death, a certain idea of France — that of a nation imbued by a republican spirit as generous as it is rigorous — grew a bit dimmer. Glucksmann spent his life à…
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How the Littlest Vaudeville Act Survived Josef Mengele’s Lab
When Gaby FeBland was looking through the résumés of actors she was casting in her play, “The Lilliput Troupe,” she was astonished by what she saw. “[These actors], for a lot of them this is the first time they’ve played individuals,” FeBland said. “You had such talented actors audition, and their résumés would just say…
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Film & TV Israel’s Rocking Microcosm
Everyone should be able to agree on Sderot. Leftists, rightists, Jews, non-Jews. A small settlement of folks — unwanted by the countries they’d lived in for centuries, and thrown together in an inhospitable land within internationally accepted boundaries by the will of the central government — have combined to make a vibrant community whose musical…
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Could ‘Baseball Aliyah’ Help Jumpstart American Pastime in Israel?
Baseball is known as the national pastime of the United States. The same cannot be said in Israel, but a new program enlisting American Jewish ballplayers is aimed at honing the skills of Israeli hopefuls and elevating the game in the Jewish state. The Israel Association of Baseball is hoping its “Israel Baseball Experience” program,…
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Was Gore Vidal the Real Crypto-Nazi?
Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal By Jay Parini Doubleday, 480 pages, $35 Gore Vidal was not opposed to the odd rhetorical hand grenade. “As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself,” he told William F. Buckley live on ABC in Chicago in…
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Books Wine, Crime and a Jewish Financier
When Frances Dinkelspiel wrote the proposal for her new book, she had planned to leave her own connection to the California wine industry out of it. But as she started writing, she realized she had two intertwining stories to tell. One was a modern crime story — the tale of the 2005 arson fire that…
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Overcoming Group Hugs and Other Things I Learned on a Jewish Spiritual Retreat
I’m sitting in the dirt trying to talk to a tree. It’s day two of SoulQuest, a weekend Jewish spiritual retreat in upstate New York, and one of the group leaders, a soft-spoken woman with a wide smile, has instructed us — dared us — to have a conversation out loud with nature. She also…
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The Problem With Mammograms
Hallie Leighton had dense breasts — a fact she discovered only in her late 30s, via a mammogram. She grew up in an Ashkenazi family in New York, pursued a career in writing and worked with organizations promoting peace between Israelis and Arabs. By 2013 she was making a documentary on her father Jan Leighton,…
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