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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How Jill Soloway Created ‘Transparent’ — the Jewiest Show Ever
On its face, “Transparent” is a television series about a transgender father coming out to his three young adult children. It weaves together the tragicomic family dynamics of five unbelievably narcissistic people. It is also arguably the Jewiest television show ever. Sure, lots of television shows have featured Jewish characters. In long-running series like “Seinfeld,”…
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‘Klinghoffer’ Protesters United Against ‘Anti-Semitic’ Opera
On the first crisp night of fall, about a thousand people — many of them in wheelchairs — gathered outside the Metropolitan Opera to protest the opening night of John Adams’s opera “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Both sides of Broadway between 63rd and 68th street were closely secured by NYPD officers and some of their…
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When ‘Klinghoffer’ Played the Heartland
The production of “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the Metropolitan Opera has caused a storm of anger among Jewish leaders and laypeople. Protests have drawn hundreds of Jews to the Met, and top New York Jewish leaders met with Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, urging him to cancel the opera. Major Jewish groups, including…
The Latest
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Books The Soviet Pastoral of David Bezmozgis
● THE BETRAYERS By David Bezmozgis Little, Brown, 240 pages, $26 David Bezmozgis’s slim new novel, “The Betrayers,” seems at first deceptively simple, then, at second glance, deceptively complex. Set against a historical and political background that becomes too heavy a burden to bear on its slender scaffolding, it is the story of a noble…
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The Resurrection of ‘Klinghoffer’
Near a barren tree in the middle of a bleak, gray landscape, the Chorus of Exiled Palestinians mills about onstage. Wrapped in dark garments, their weary aspects suggesting immigrants at Ellis Island, they contrast starkly with the largely empty crimson-and-gold Metropolitan Opera House, its tiers of box seats wedding caked above each other. In the…
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The Best Documentary Filmmaker You’ve Never Heard Of
Manny Kirchheimer is one of the New York City’s most under-appreciated documentary filmmakers. His film “Stations of the Elevated,” which is getting a retrospective theatrical run this week (Oct. 17 to Oct. 23) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is considered to be the first documentary about graffiti. However, calling “Stations of the Elevated a…
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Lend Me Your (Yiddish) Earlocks
Even if one is naturally curious, one often accepts strange things unquestioningly for what they are. I suppose that’s why I never wondered about the odd phrase di linke peye, “the left ear lock,” in the Yiddish expression ikh hob es in der linker peye, “I have it in the left ear lock,” or es…
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For David Bezmozgis, Fiction Must Go Far Beneath the Surface
The first thing I noticed about the writer David Bezmozgis when I sat down to breakfast with him in Brooklyn in late September was the tattoo on his forearm — a blue cursive Cyrillic D framed by a diamond. I first met Bezmozgis in 2010, and we’ve since become friends, and I’ve never shaken the…
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Susan Sontag’s Not-So-Secret and Not-Always-So-Jewish History
● Susan Sontag: A Biography By Daniel Schreiber Translated from the German by David Dollenmayer Northwestern University Press, 296 pages, $35 According to this welcome biography, which originally appeared in German in 2007, the artist Joseph Cornell believed that the American Jewish essayist and filmmaker Susan Sontag was the “great-great-grandmother of [French actor] Jean-Paul Belmondo……
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The Minivan Rabbi of Mississippi
Most rabbis wait for Jews to come to them. Rabbi Jeremy Simons goes to the Jews. As the new itinerant rabbi for the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, Simons drives through 13 states, serving 110 congregations from Oklahoma to Virginia. When we met with him in his office at the ISJL, a squat brown building…
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7 Facts About Jewish Mississippi
1. Mississippi’s first official Jewish religious service is believed to have occurred in the port town of Natchez in 1800. 2. Perry Nussbaum, rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel in Jackson, was heavily involved in the civil rights movement. In September 1967, the synagogue in Jackson was bombed by Ku Klux Klan members. In November of…
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