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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This Is Your Brain on Kabbalah
Kabbalah: A Neurocognitive Approach to Mystical Experiences By Shahar Arzy and Moshe Idel Yale University Press, 216 pages, $50 Eight hundred years before Oliver Sacks started poking around patients’ brains to see how they produce hallucinations, another Jew, Abraham Abulafia, was doing similar research on himself — by purposely inducing his own hallucinations. Except, he…
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Film & TV How Woody Allen Lost Me
Here’s a free idea for a play. Or maybe it’s just a skit. I was thinking of writing it a while back, but the premise seemed thin, so I set it aside. It’s a light comedy, circa 1970-something. A young, neurotic film critic — just getting out of yet another bad relationship — is visited…
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How a French Museum Whitewashes Le Corbusier’s Anti-Semitism
Le Corbusier — the Swiss-French master of modernist architecture — was a fascist sympathizer who had an office in Vichy during the Second World War and displayed anti-Semitism in his private correspondence. But an exhibition currently running at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, “Le Corbusier: Mesures de l’homme,” won’t tell you any of this. The…
The Latest
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Why My Grandfather Played the Lottery
Every Friday my maternal grandfather, Rabbi Abraham Twersky, a scion of a long line of Hasidic rebbes straight from the Baal Shem Tov, who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the ’60s and ’70s, would buy a lottery ticket. He did so sheepishly, but also with a little pride. “I have bitochen…
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There’s No Place Like Kansas City
New parents, Camille and Jorge Soto, both 24, had a new addition to their family when their daughter, Lisa, was born almost four months ago. Originally from Asunción, Paraguay, he is a financial risk analyst at Ernst & Young. She is a substitute teacher at Académie Lafayette, a French charter school, as well as a…
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The Progress of Poet Maxine Kumin
The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir By Maxine Kumin W.W. Norton & Company, 176 pages, $25.95 In her poem “Sonnets Uncorseted,” Maxine Kumin bemoans the sexist attitudes that constrained 20th-century American women poets. Immersed in motherhood and domesticity, she confesses to having been “Terrified of writing domestic poems,/… anathema to the prevailing clique of male pooh-bahs[.]”…
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Music How Kenny Schaffer Became the Father of Invention
‘A lot of things are invented by people looking for money,” says Kenny Schaffer. “Many people say I should be a billionaire many times over, but it doesn’t matter to me. I go for ideas that stimulate or excite me. It’s not the American way of doing business, but I’ve been able to eke out…
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Converting to Verdi
The village of Oberammergau might be the least Jewish place on earth. Nestling at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, the town is synonymous with the Passion play that residents have been putting on since 1637, a theatrical and religious spectacle that for much of history transmitted anti-Jewish prejudice, inciting pogroms and other violent acts…
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6 Artists You Didn’t Know Used Yiddish, From Elvis to Public Enemy
It’s astounding how much Yiddish has infiltrated today’s popular culture. From classic musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” to sitcoms like Seinfeld, some words and phrases of Ashkenazi Jews’ native tongue have become Americanized, naturalized, and sometimes clichéd. So, when Public Enemy released its latest album, “Man Plans, God Laughs,” emblazoned with , we decided…
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Music The Life and Timeline of George Wein
1925: George Theodore Wein is born on October 3 in Lynn, Massachusetts. 1930s: Wein grows up in the heavily Jewish suburb of Newton, where, as he would later write, “the children… were spared the discrimination that had plagued earlier generations.” But this didn’t necessarily mean his family was particularly observant. He remembers seeing his father,…
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Remembering Theo Bikel, a Fighter to the End
Theodore Bikel, who has died at the age of 91 in Los Angeles, was a shtarker, unlike many showbiz stars who merely play shtarkers on TV or onscreen. The barrel-chested, booming-voiced actor and singer had talent and stamina, the kind that allowed him to play Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” over 2000 times. After…
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