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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Vilna Becomes ‘Vilnius’ and Lithuanian is Making Itself Heard
100 Years Ago An entire family of Italians is in Beth Israel Hospital for circumcisions after converting to Judaism. Joseph Petrigliano and his three sons, who live on Orchard Street in Corona, part of Long Island, N.Y., decided to convert to Judaism after Petrigliano’s Jewish wife, an immigrant from Galicia, told him of her recurring…
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Art You Are Your Parents — and These Stunning Pictures Prove It
It all started with my grandfather, Sidney Goldstein, and his Korean War memoir. I found it several years ago while helping clean out my grandparents’ garage. I was 26 when I read it for the first time, and he was 27 when he wrote the letters his memoir was based on. I knew he’d written…
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Jason Alexander Talks Broadway, Israel, and Killing Susan
Jason Alexander is the star of stage, screen and Festivus. Of late, too, he has been a major trending topic on the Internet, all because of some poisoned envelopes. Alexander played George Costanza for nine seasons on Seinfeld. In season seven, he was engaged to Susan (Heidi Swedberg), who sadly met the grim reaper while…
The Latest
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POEM: A Man in Darkness
Your presence in darkness: in your mother’s belly, at night as you sleep beneath the blanket, in a military guard post, in a prison hole, in the belly of the earth. In the shadows your body’s movements are hidden, but so are the movements of your enemy (you might rub your nose, he might pull…
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New York Gets the Biggest Yiddish Festival of All
The largest Yiddish cultural festival since the 1930s is coming to New York. Kulturfest: The First Chana Mlotek International Festival of Jewish Performing Arts, of which the Forward is a media sponsor, will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene with a weeklong series of Jewish music, theater, film and art events….
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Books ‘Vilna Vegetarian’ and Me
Born in in 1910, my grandmother Rachela Pupko Krinsky Melezin was a Vilner through and through. When I told her, during college, that I was becoming vegetarian — that the days of devouring her kreplach and piroshki were over — she took it as most Jewish grandmothers would. I wish I could have directed her…
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Art The Exhilarating Passions of Marc Chagall
“Chagall-Malevich” is an exhilarating paean to the uplifting power of art. Part docu-drama, part fantasy, the film is largely based on the life of Marc Chagall, widely considered the greatest Jewish artist of the 20th Century. Born Moishe Shagal into a Hasidic community in the Pale of the Settlement, Chagall found and pursued his passion…
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Why I Don’t Erase My Voicemail Anymore
‘Happy Anniversary to you….” My grandmother Rose’s Brooklyn-tinged singing voice is just slightly off-key. Even though she passed away four years ago, she still sings for our anniversary each year — because I saved the voicemail of the last time she sang it. When she was still alive, I hardly bothered to listen to her…
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That time I painted Saul Bellow
There is that moment, when you’ve said or done something that possibly you will regret, but can’t be certain. Such were the seconds which followed the thin metallic thump of my envelope addressed to Saul Bellow as it briefly slid and fell to the bottom of my neighborhood mailbox. Years of musing about this letter…
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Music Violinist Completes Father’s Piece Cut Short by Nazis
In Raanana, Israel, Eugene Drucker’s brown eyes welled with tears as he finished a rendition of Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77, which his father began 80 years prior in Germany, only to be cut short by anti-Semitic Nazi policy. Accompanied by the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra, the 63-year-old, says his father, Ernest Drucker,…
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Books 8 Things You Didn’t Know About Judd Apatow, Book Lover
When one thinks of Judd Apatow, books aren’t the first thing that come to mind. Bro-medies? Sure. Seth Rogen? Definitely. Weed? Duh. But books? And yet, the man behind “Pineapple Express” and “Knocked Up” apparently owns a lot of books. As he recently told : “I have actually convinced myself that buying books is the…
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