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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Film & TV
Is ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Anti-Semitic?
If, unlike me, you didn’t spend your entire weekend binge-watching the new season of “Orange is The New Black,” you may not be aware of the major Jewish narrative arc that has developed at Litchfield Penitentiary. My first reaction was jubilation. And then I started watching. And disappointment hit. Because despite the laughs and the…
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Where All the Reasons To Kill Are Absurd
By Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen Other Press, 160 Pages, $14.95 Kamel Daoud kick-starts his novel with the line “Mama’s still alive today,” turning inside out the celebrated opening of Albert Camus’s “The Stranger”: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” What would Camus say were he alive today,…
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Music When Alvin Ailey Choreographs the Holocaust
With the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater presenting a Holocaust inspired piece, “No Longer Silent,” at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, the iconic African American company has branched into new territory. In fact, it’s unprecedented, explained its artistic director Robert Battle, who choreographed the piece. Its musical score was composed by Erwin…
The Latest
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What James Merrill Thought of the Jews
James Merrill: Life and Art Langdon Hammer Knopf, 944 pages, $40.00 On the 20th anniversary of his death, this massive funerary stele of a book pays tribute to an American poet much inspired by Jewish friends and mentors. Merrill was born in 1926 to a WASP family in New York – his father was a…
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What’s in an Old Dictionary? Plenty of Anti-Semitism.
When I was in my sophomore year of high school, I spent many of my lunch hours eating alone. I would sit on a knee-high bench in the locker room, in one of the music wing’s boxy practice rooms or at a table in the expansive domed cafeteria we called the Great Hall. Afterward I…
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I Went To New Hampshire To Buy J.D. Salinger’s House
I have traveled to Cornish, New Hampshire, with the intention of buying J.D. Salinger’s house. Last year, when the house went on the market, it was listed for $679,000, but now Jane Darrach, the real estate agent for the property, has told me the price has dropped to “585-ish.” It seems like a lot of…
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Melting Pot in Milwaukee
Rabbi Tiferet Berenbaum, 32, is the spiritual leader of Congregation Shir Hadash, a Reconstructionist congregation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her husband, Joel Berenbaum, 31, is currently studying to be a special education teacher at Alverno College and runs the Spiritual World of Nature program at Schlitz Audubon Nature Center. He is also co-chair of the Jewish…
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Bill T. Jones’s Slow Dance Through History
‘You like them kosher, don’t you, Bill?” Edith Zane observed when she learned that her late son’s partner, the African-American dancer Bill T. Jones, had taken up with another Jew. Jones recalls this conversation drily, not bothered by the teasing. She was right about his predilections. “There’s no accident that I’ve had three major loves,…
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Of Sarah Silverman, Susanna Heschel and 8 Other Things About Jewish New Hampshire
10,120 Jews live in New Hampshire. In the late 19th century, Abraham and Rachel Isaac founded what was reported New Hampshire’s first Jewish business, which was called “The Cheap Shop.” New Hampshire’s oldest synagogue is Temple Adath Yeshurun of Manchester, founded in 1891. Poet Maxine Kumin lived on a farm in the town of Warner….
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9 Can’t-Miss Shows at Kulturfest
Hard as it is to believe, KulturfestNYC is the first ever international festival of Jewish performing arts of its kind to be held in the Big Apple. These sorts of multi-disciplinary, weeklong events take place all over the world — from Toronto to Krakow — but never before in one week under one umbrella could…
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Film & TV Remembering Fagin and Ron Moody, the Man Who Played Him
The British Jewish actor Ron Moody, who died on June 11 at age 91, will be remembered for making Charles Dickens’ harshly anti-Semitic character Fagin into someone loveable. In stage productions and the 1968 film of the musical Oliver!, Moody, who was born Ronald Moodnick, became the definitive interpreter of the role, despite the reservations…
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News Why do some people think Mike Lawler is Jewish?
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Art At the Venice Biennale, protests, self-mutilation and rage against Israel and Russia. Is anyone left to talk about the art?