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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Philip Levine Was Working-Class Poet Inspired by Yiddishkeit
Philip Levine, the Jewish poet who died on February 14 at age 87, was a feisty writer inspired by working class roots and a family tradition of bubbe-meises (grandmother’s fables). In “Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections” (2000) Levine analysed his poem “The Old Testament”: “My twin brother swears that at age thirteen I’d…
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Egon Schiele, My Father and Me
Nemo dat quod non habeat You cannot give what you do not have. My father began collecting Egon Schieles in the 1950s, his apartment filled to overflowing with near-pornographic images of cadaverous men and women, many with red hair like Ilona, my new stepmother, a childless, childlike woman as different from my accomplished, emancipated mother…
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A Cleveland Son’s Debt to Anny Katan and Sigmund Freud
Anny Katan learned psychoanalysis at Sigmund Freud’s knee — on his lap, in fact! “I grew up often literally sitting on Freud’s lap when I was very little,” Katan explained in a 1986 interview, reminiscing about her childhood in Vienna. Her personal history, intertwined as it was with the origins of psychoanalysis and with the…
The Latest
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Poet Laureate Philip Levine Dies at 87
Poet laureate Philip Levine died of pancreatic cancer on Saturday morning at the age of 87. Dan Friedman, writing for the Forward on August 9, 2011, characterized the poet as a working-class Jewish hero of words: Levine was one of the oldest poets laureate and his work was certainly the most humble in tone from…
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‘Downton Abbey’ Creator Weighs in on His Debt to Judaism
Julian Fellowes was to the manor born. It just wasn’t a “Downton Abbey”-size manor. Fellowes, of course, is the creator, sole writer, and executive producer of “Downton Abbey,” arguably the greatest global television phenomenon of the 21st century. Here in the U.S., where it is concluding its fifth season, it is the most popular series…
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New York Times Columnist Roger Cohen Opens Up in Family Memoir
The Girl from Human Street By Roger Cohen Knopf, 320 pages, $27.95 “The journalist moves in the opposite direction from the crowd, toward danger, often leaving the settled majority perplexed,” writes Roger Cohen in the opening pages of his deeply penetrating memoir about his mother. Cohen, a London-based New York Times columnist, is a former…
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Henry Geldzahler Gets Another 15 Minutes of Fame
Tucked away in a corner of Chelsea is some of the most important art ever to be shown in New York. Or, at least, it was once upon a time. The show at the Paul Kasmin Gallery may not seem any more significant than the collections on view in Chelsea’s other galleries, but all the…
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Of Steven Spielberg, the Shvitz, Langston Hughes and 11 Other Things About Jewish Ohio
1) 148,680 Jews live in Ohio, representing 1.3% of the state’s population. 2) Ohio is the state with the eighth largest Jewish population — more than Texas, less than Maryland. 3) The first two Jewish families to reside in the capital city of Columbus were the Nusbaums and the Gundersheimers, both from the Bavarian village…
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Will the Real Adolf Hitler Please Stand Up?
Incongruous as it may initially sound, “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s immortal line from “Romeo and Juliet” lies at the core of Matt Ogens’s endearingly offbeat documentary “Meet the Hitlers.” In the play, Juliet Capulet famously raises the question to declare that the stigma associated with the surname of her lover, Romeo Montague, will not…
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A Museum as Big as Texas
Perhaps surprisingly, the newly launched National Center for Jewish Art doesn’t reside on the East Coast, in California, or in Chicago. Instead, it is housed at Dallas’s Museum of Biblical Art, which lives up to its state’s reputation for enormity. Even excluding Gib Singleton’s soon-to-be-installed, huge outdoor “Via Dolorosa” installation, the museum boasts 30,000 square…
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‘Gett’ Depicts an Orthodox Universe That Is Beyond Kafkasque
“Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” is a plea on behalf of agunot, women whose husbands refuse to grant them a religious divorce. It is an indictment of the Israeli justice system, which doesn’t provide for civil marriage or its dissolution, and of the rabbinical courts that do hold such powers. Most of all, the…
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