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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Country Roads Took Me Home to West Virginia
Upon graduation, many college students land jobs in big cities. I went to West Virginia. The move generated quizzical looks from my family and friends in the Northeast. What kind of place is that for an aspiring young Jew? Turns out, it was perfect. Upon graduation, many college students land jobs in big cities. I…
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Will Helen Mirren Be Typecast as a Jew?
When I first meet Helen Mirren, the actress pauses before she shakes my hand. Instead, she goes for the hand sanitizer. “I’m appearing in a play,” she says, “and I’m deathly afraid of catching a cold.” I suggest a fist bump instead, but once sanitized she goes with the more traditional route. Mirren is currently…
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Nicole Eisenman Is an Artist With a Lot on Her ‘Seder’ Plate
The first things I noticed when standing in front of Nicole Eisenman’s “Seder,” a painting commissioned by the Jewish Museum in 2010 depicting a family Passover gathering, were the hands. Garishly pink and fleshy, they rise from the lower edge of the canvas. They’re cartoonish, really, like something out of the work of Philip Guston,…
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‘Mr. Kaplan’ Explores Uruguay’s Nazi Past Through Comedy
In 2009, when South American filmmaker Álvaro Brechner’s movie “Bad Day To Go Fishing” was accepted into the Warsaw Film Festival, he took the opportunity to visit the Polish neighborhood where his grandfather was born. Brechner’s grandparents had fled to South America just before World War II, with the family first settling in Bolivia before…
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The Joy of Gene Saks
Gene Saks, who died on March 28 at age 93, has understandably been chiefly identified for having helmed such Neil Simon hits as “Brighton Beach Memoirs,”; “Prisoner of Second Avenue”; “Last of the Red Hot Lovers”; and the screen versions of “The Odd Couple” and “Barefoot in the Park,”, among others. Yet Saks was more…
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On Alexandre, the Greatest Jewish Composer You’ve Never Heard of
When “Ida” received the Oscar for best foreign film, it put a global spotlight on a Polish story about that nation’s struggle to face Jewish memories from the Nazi era. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave a concert that touched on these themes in a different way. The orchestra performed the long-awaited American…
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Some of Abe Lincoln’s Best Friends Were Jewish. Honestly.
● Lincoln and the Jews: A History By Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell Thomas Dunne Books, 288 pages, $40 As far as we know, Abraham Lincoln never said, “Some of my best friends are Jewish.” But he certainly could have. Lincoln did chide his anti-Semitic Civil War generals and others who expressed the prejudices…
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Chasing ‘The Messiah’ and Bruno Schulz’s Long-Lost Novel
Despite the limited number of literary works that survived his life, cut short by a Nazi’s bullet in wartime Poland, many today view Bruno Schulz as one of the 20th century’s most interesting and imaginative writers. First brought to public light in the United States in the 1970s by Philip Roth, he inspired such prominent…
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14 Facts About Jewish West Virginia
1) About 2,300 Jews live in West Virginia, which is 0.1 percent of the state’s population. 2) Every four years, the West Virginia Jewish Reunion is held in Charleston, reuniting hundreds of former and current residents from across the state. The event, which is sponsored by descendants of Simon and Ida Meyer of Huntington, includes…
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Why David Greenspan Is Easy To Admire But Hard To Like
I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees By David Greenspan Directed by Leigh Silverman Abrons Arts Center Over the course of decades, the writer, director and actor David Greenspan has built a body of work that downtown theater people consider with something close to awe while the general public has often been baffled. He’s won six Obie…
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A Haggadah for Just About Every Taste
“Who’s this year’s Cokie Roberts?” That’s what my partner asked, as I rifled through this year’s crop of new Haggadot. Each year, it seemed, brought a new edition written or edited by a celebrity: Cokie Roberts, Nathan Englander, Edgar Bronfman, Elie Wiesel. But not this year. And browsing Amazon’s best-sellers, I got a sense of…
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