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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Books
King (Norman) Lear Looks Back at Those ’70s Shows
When he was 9 years old, Norman Lear had a life-defining epiphany. He was at home one evening, fooling around with a crystal radio set he’d gotten as a gift, when he managed to tune into a broadcast by Father Charles Coughlin, the infamous anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priest. “At 9 I learned that people disliked…
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Books The Secret Jewish History of ‘My Fair Lady’
● Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters Edited by Dominic McHugh Oxford University Press, 336 Pages, $39.95 Sometimes the Yiddishkeit of a creative talent comes through only in private writings. Playwright and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner won immortality with the stage musicals “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot,” and “Gigi,” which are filled with British and French…
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Better Call Saul Steinberg
This is the centenary year of artist Saul Steinberg, probably best known for his cover art for The New Yorker, particularly, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” his illustration of the world as seen by a typically myopic New Yorker. As part of the celebratory events surrounding the centenary, the Art Institute of Chicago…
The Latest
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Books The Girlfriend He Left in Vienna
In my parents’ basement I found a box of my grandfather’s, marked “C.J. Wildman, personal”; inside it I discovered another, smaller file box labeled “Patient Correspondence, A–G.” The letters were not from patients; they were from the life he left behind in Vienna when he fled the Nazis: half-siblings, cousins, friends — and a girlfriend….
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Books My Life in Exile
Hugh Roth is the younger son of Henry Roth, author of “Call It Sleep” and “Mercy of a Rude Stream.” Growing up, Hugh worked on his father’s waterfowl farm in Augusta, Maine, in the 1950s. After some decades in and around New York, he now lives on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Rockland,…
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The Hasidim of Brooklyn Are Ready for Their Close-Up
The art at the Brooklyn Public Library branch on Grand Army Plaza just got a little more frum and a little more Japanese. Through February, the library is featuring a black and white photo exhibit depicting the life and rituals of Crown Heights’ Chabad Lubavitch hasidim. The exhibit, entitled “The Hasidim of Crown Heights, Brooklyn;…
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8 Facts About Jewish Missouri
1. Approximately 59,000 Jews live in Missouri. 2. Mark Twain’s relationship with Jews in Missouri was complicated. The Levys were the only Jewish family in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. As a kid, Twain joined other kids in his community in hazing the Levy kids. Only later in life did he become something of a…
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The Only Thing Worth Working For, Worth Fighting For, Worth Dying For
● Palestine in Turmoil: The Struggle for Sovereignty, 1933-1939 By Monty Penkower, Touro College Press, 348 pages, $39 Monty Noam Penkower, in the latest of his fine works on the genesis of the State of Israel, examines in detail the history of 1930s Palestine. But counterintuitively, Penkower’s context for “Palestine in Turmoil: The Struggle for…
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Books Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Author
● Not that Kind of Girl By Lena Dunham Random House, 265 Pages, $28 I like Lena Dunham. I liked “Delusional Downtown Divas,” her web series for Index Magazine. I liked “Tiny Furniture,” her 2010 film. And I like “Girls” (except for that one episode at the end of the first season when Jessa married…
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Books Throwback Thursday: Novellas About Sexy Tel Aviv
Regina Kolitz // Copyright Forward Association Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Publisher Heinrich H. Glanz created the Juedisch-Politische Bibliothek [Jewish-Political] series of books in Vienna before it was “confiscated” after Nazi Anschluss in 1938. After emigrating to…
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Neil Diamond’s 32nd Album Is His Best in 40 Years
Sometime back in 1986, it finally dawned on me that Neil Diamond might actually be cool. This wasn’t the easiest or most logical conclusion to come to, having spent so much of my elementary and high school years cowering amid the bombastic onslaught of “Longfellow Serenade,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” (his wrist-slittingly maudlin divorce-rock…
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