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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From This You Make a Living?
What do you want to do when you grow up? my Grandma Sil always asked. “I want to be a cantor,” is what I said. It made her smile and hug me. “Cantor” meant I was not only deeply engaged in the lessons of my yeshiva but also that I longed to sing about it….
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Film & TV How Shalom Auslander Learned To Be ‘HAPPYish’
Shalom Auslander is not the most upbeat guy in the world. Ask if he’s happy, and his response tells you all you to need to know: “My wife and my kids. I’m afraid of them dying all the time. I can’t hear a siren go by without thinking my house is on fire and everyone…
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POEM: Lag B’Omer
And at home in these wasted paradises after the invasion and the raising of the flag and Cain after the ousting of one dictator and the installing of another the carcasses will be gnawed white – Kwame Dawes Thirty-three days after we left Egypt, the manna started dropping from heaven. It lay on the ground…
The Latest
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The Libyans Give Ancient Music a Fresh New Sound
The Libyans are actually Israelis. But Yaniv Raba and Yankale Segal have carved a singular pop niche by reimagining ancient Libyan-Jewish sacred hymns, or piyutim, as worldbeat anthems. With their distinctly modern mashup of musical styles, they’re also rescuing a beautiful genre of devotional poetry that came very close to disappearing. Arabic, African, Turkish and…
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How Ron Rifkin Went From the Fur Business to Carnegie Hall
“I’m just an actor,” exclaims Ron Rifkin, who then adds the most un-actor-y words ever spoke by an actor in the history of theater: “I don’t like to talk about myself.” He mentions his reluctance because our conversation had veered into unexpected territory, at least for him. I’d asked about his approach to some past…
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HomeLands: ‘A Shtetl in Manhattan’
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, 75, and her husband, Bert Pogrebin, 81, have been living in their co-op apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side since 1970. They moved in when their twin daughters, Abigail and Robin, were 5 years old, and their son, David, was 2. Bert is a labor and employment lawyer at Littler Mendelson P.C….
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Film & TV How a German Jewish Refugee Became a Master of Film Noir
In London, the British Film Institute — the leading organization for film in the U.K. — is running a two-month season dedicated to the renowned German Jewish filmmaker, Robert Siodmak (1900-73). The centerpiece of this major retrospective of over 20 films is the re-release of “Cry of the City” (1948), a noir crime thriller that…
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European Parliament Demands Soviet Union Give Jews Rights
1915 • 100 Years Ago Forty-eight-year-old fruit peddler Israel Ziftz was cutting coconuts when the knife he was using slipped and wound up going directly into his chest. Ziftz, who lives in East Harlem, realized he was in trouble, and so he went hastily to Beth Israel Medical Center, where doctors quickly grasped that, with…
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Why the ’60s Were the Most Interesting Decade After All
Richard Goldstein has written a book that refutes the old saying, “If you remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there.” Goldstein, the former Village Voice executive editor who helped invent rock criticism with his omnivorous “Pop Eye” column, seems to have been more “there” during the decade than almost anyone else. The self-described “Zelig of…
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A Summer in Paradise
At first glance Alfred and Sylvia Lawrie were hardly the sort of people one would have called intimidating. Alfred was in his late 70s, tall and vague, one of those elderly men who stay long and skinny in the arms and legs, but put on weight in the middle. His beard was white and haphazard,…
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My Storied Life With Gerald Shapiro
In the awful middle of the night hours right after Gerry’s death, when I couldn’t concentrate on anything and was wondering how I was going to get through the night, much less the rest of my life, it occurred to me that the one thing I could do was reread Gerry’s stories, and they comforted…
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