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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Of Mardi Gras, Britney Spears and 6 Other Things About Jewish Louisiana
1) Louisiana is home to 10,675 Jews, which is 0.2% of the state’s total population. 2) The first king of New Orleans’ popular Rex Carnival Mardi Gras parade in 1872 was Louis Solomon, a local businessman. 3) Judah Benjamin was a U.S. Senator from Louisiana from 1853 to 1861. After that, he became the Attorney…
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What Would You Do If Someone Thought Your Son Was God?
What do you do if your toddler is a god? (To start, hold the Jewish mother jokes.) In Sarah Ruhl’s beautiful and searching new play, “The Oldest Boy,” now playing at Lincoln Center Theater’s off-Broadway Mitzi Newhouse Theater, a Catholic-raised, all-American mother is visited by a pair of Buddhist monks, who inform her that her…
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11 Greatest Mike Nichols Moments
Born Mikhail Peschkowsky in Berlin, Mike Nichols went on to become one of the greatest forces in American comedy and film. An early member of Chicago’s Compass Players, which went on to become Second City, one half of Nichols and May, director of “The Graduate,” “Catch 22,” and most recently “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Nichols has…
The Latest
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How ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Shattered My Dreams
When “Fiddler on the Roof” opened on Broadway in the fall of 1964, I was singing in the chorus in “Ben Franklin In Paris,” another Broadway show, which starred Robert Preston. I also performed in the ballroom scene whenever one of the dancers wasn’t feeling well, because I was the only singer who could also…
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Books My Year of Not Shopping
All images courtesy Sarah Lazarovic Equal parts autobiography, treatise, art project, and social commentary, Sarah Lazarovic’s “A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy” (Penguin Books) chronicles a year in which the author sublimated consumer urges by drawing things instead of purchasing them. But the book’s much more than a visual diary. Lazarovic’s elegant,…
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Books Writers Line Up For Israel’s Top Literary Prize
Reuven Namdar in New York. Photo by Beth Kissileff. In a time when the famed British Man Booker Prize has been opened to writers in English from all countries, Israel too has achieved a milestone. For the first time in its 14 years, the Sapir Prize, given by Mif’al Ha-Payis (Israel’s national lottery), has on…
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Film & TV The Yiddish Path to Acting Fame and Fortune
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here Like all actors attempting to break into the notoriously difficult profession, Michael Levi Harris is seeking to stand out. Luckily, Harris has a talent that is almost unique: he has an exceptional knack for languages. Not only can Harris speak many tongues but he also has…
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The Secret Jewish History of Pink Floyd
Try as hard as they might, Pink Floyd is the band that refuses to die. The group’s founder and original visionary, Syd Barrett, called it quits in 1968, and by any rights it should have ended there. Yet the group has survived the loss of two frontmen and other founding members, and has endured changing…
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Music A Song for the Victims
Within hours of today’s terrorist attack on the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood, Israeli singer Amir Benayoun had already written, produced and released a new song about the killing of four Jewish worshipers by Palestinians. The popular musician, who sings in Hebrew and Arabic, has a history of responding to political…
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Searching for Amenia, New York’s Lost Jewish Vacationland
One spring day in 1927, two New York City real estate speculators drove upstate to Dutchess County with a couple of girls and had a bit to drink. Before they got home again, they had bought half of Amenia, an old upstate mining hamlet ringed with dairy farms. By summer, they were selling bungalows on…
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The Greatest Yiddish Writer You Never Heard Of
● Memories and Scenes: Shtetl, Childhood, Writers By Jacob Dinezon Translated from the Yiddish by Tina Lunson Jewish Storyteller Press, 240 pages, $19.95 In “Apocalypse,” a short story by Yiddish writer Jacob Dinezon, three elderly Jews get to talking about the concept of Rothschild, and about whether such a person actually exists. “In reality there…
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