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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The Small Florida Town That Could Have Been a Jewish Utopia
Judging by the numbers, Micanopy, Florida, is a small town. Its population is just 609. According to its website, the town has three restaurants, two real estate offices, and one horse and carriage rental service. The closest Starbucks is 12 miles away, but tourists looking for an antique shop are in luck. Micanopy has 13…
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How ‘Aladdin’ Became A Hanukkah Musical
Over Christmas last year, the New Wimbledon Theatre in South London staged — as many English theaters do this time of year — the story of “Aladdin.” The comedienne Jo Brand played the Genie; former “Britain’s Got Talent” contestants Flawless were the Peking Police Force; and faded television presenter Matthew Kelly donned a dress to…
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When Terrorists Become Capitalists
Nick Bright is a trader, and he’s working an angle. The main character in Ayad Akhtar’s new play “The Invisible Hand,” Nick is an American banker working in Pakistan, and he’s been kidnapped by what we might politely term an armed Muslim religious group. (We might also call them terrorists.) Nick was kidnapped by accident…
The Latest
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‘Regarding Susan Sontag’ Focuses on Life at Expense of Her Work
When Susan Sontag passed away in 2004, her New York Times obituary described her as a “renowned novelist, essayist, and critic.” “Regarding Susan Sontag,” a documentary directed by Nancy Kates that airs on HBO on December 8, shows that Sontag might have appreciated that order, with the word “novelist” leading the way. Despite all of…
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Phil, We Hardly Knew Ye — Or Should We Say Vous?
Zev Shanken writes from Teaneck, New Jersey: “Your comments on profanity in your November 7 column reminded me of a discussion I once had with a native French speaker who asked if there is an English equivalent to the French distinction between tu, the familiar form of ‘you’ in the second-person singular, and vous, the…
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Israel Zamir, a Man Who Was Far More Than Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Son
The journalist, author, and translator Israel Zamir, who died on November 22 at age 85, deserves to be remembered as more than just the son of Nobel prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991). As he wrote in Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer, a 1995 memoir which is due out in paperback in June 2015,,…
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Of Yidstock, Sarah Silverman and 16 Other Things About Jewish Florida
1. At over 850,000 Jews, Florida is home to 16% of the American Jewish community. 2. Miami has the third largest Jewish Metro area in North America right behind New York and Los Angeles. 3. Miami’s southern counties have the second largest concentration of Jewish inhabitants after Israel (15%). 4. The city of Fort Myers…
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How Modernist Artists Survived (and Sometimes Thrived) Under Nazis
● Artists under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany By Jonathan Petropoulos Yale University Press, 424 pages, $40 Nearly 70 years after the end of World War II, newly available archives and probing scholarship are sharpening our perspective on daily life, culture, political infighting, and collaboration and resistance in the Third Reich. Jonathan Petropoulos’s…
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Books Times Names Best Jewish Books of Year
Photo: Martyna Starosta (JTA) — The New York Times Book Review published its “100 Notable Books of 2014” on its website Tuesday and, not surprisingly, given the whole People of the Book moniker, a number of the fiction and nonfiction books highlighted this year are of Jewish interest. (The number of Jewish authors on general…
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Of Frum Hippies, West Bank Settlements and Leo Tolstoy
● The Hilltop By Assaf Gavron Translated by Steven Cohen Scribner, 464 pages, $26 If you are hoping for the Israeli ‘War and Peace’ from Assaf Gavron’s new novel, you will be disappointed. But, as you recover from that setback, you can take comfort in Gavron’s actual achievement. For while the heft of “The Hilltop”…
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She’s Living in Her Own Private (Jewish) Idaho
I was born in Washington, D.C., where my mother called from her hospital bed to put me on the waiting list for a good nursery school. My own kids were born at home in Idaho (one in the bedroom, one in the living room), where getting them into a good preschool was a little less…
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