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
When Getting Girl Means Pretending To Be Transgender
Photo: Chloe Aftel Call it a boy-meets-girl-who-thinks-boy-was-born-a-girl story. In “Adam,” the debut novel from cult graphic memoirist Ariel Schrag, an awkward California teenager named Adam Freedman parachutes into an alien landscape of subcultures and identities when he joins his lesbian sister in Brooklyn for the summer. (Full disclosure: Schrag was featured in “Graphic Details: Confessional…
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How the Forger of Brighton Beach Duped The Claims Conference
A Replacement Life: A Novel By Boris Fishman Harper, 336 pages, $25.99 Like the Soviet Union, from which its main characters hail, Boris Fishman’s debut novel, “A Replacement Life,” is a good idea in theory, if not in execution. After his grandmother dies, aspiring writer Slava Gelman is asked by his grandfather to forge a…
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A Funny Thing Happened On My Way to the Rolling Stones Concert
On a third floor balcony across the street from me in central Jerusalem, a strange ceremony is taking place. On one side of the balcony stands a heavy-set religious man with a an oversized white dress and a huge black skullcap, and on the other side an attractive young blond woman, dressed in colorful clothes,…
The Latest
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Michael Shannon Makes Eugene Ionesco’s Disorienting ‘The Killer’ Memorable
The first task would be to describe the play. In the case of the production of Eugene Ionesco’s “The Killer” currently running at Theatre for a New Audience, this is not so easy to do. We open on Berenger (Michael Shannon), the shambling existentialist everyman who frequently leads us through Ionesco’s plays, touring a neighborhood…
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Books David Bezmozgis Turning ‘Natasha’ Into Film
Photo: David Franco A decade after its publication, Canadian author David Bezmozgis is turning his debut short story collection, “Natasha and Other Stories,” into a film. As with “Victoria Day,” his first cinematic endeavor in 2009, Bezmozgis, a graduate of the University of Southern California’s film school, is both writing and directing the project. The…
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The Secret Jewish History of The Rolling Stones
When the Rolling Stones take the stage at HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv on June 4, it represents more than just the world’s greatest and longest-running rock band’s first concert in Israel. It also marked one small victory in the war against a rock ’n’ roll boycott of Israel being waged by some English rockers,…
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233 Reasons Why Bob Dylan Is Right To Detest His Fans
The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob By David Kinney Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $25 ‘The Dylanologists” is a truly maddening book. Ostensibly, it is the story of the obsessive, sometimes paranoid fans who pore over every Bob Dylan lyric and concert, who worship, scrutinize, stalk, analyze and clearly annoy the man himself….
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Why Rabbi Schneerson Was Good For Jews But Bad For Biographers
Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History By Joseph Telushkin HarperWave, 640 pages, $29.99 My Rebbe By Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz Maggid, 250 pages, $24.95 At the end of time, when climate change or an asteroid or the Messiah’s arrival has rendered moot Pharrell Williams, the Affordable…
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Guinness Record Holder For Longest Theater Career Dies at 90
In 2011, it was announced that the Israeli actress Hanna Maron had set a Guinness world record for the longest career in theater. Born Hanna Meierzak in Berlin in 1923 to a Polish father and mother of Hungarian origin, she began acting at age 4, and appeared in German silent films, as well as performing…
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Why God Can Sometimes Sound Female
Irving Salzman has a question about an ancient Hebrew prayer, the answer to which involves some fine points of linguistic history that may not interest everyone. Yet since the prayer is one that all of you who are synagogue-goers know and may have wondered about, too, I’ll risk discussing it. The prayer begins with the…
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A Jew Joins the Académie Française
In April, after the deaths in recent years of such venerable French Jewish members as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and biologist François Jacob, the Académie française increased its quotient of Yiddishkeit. That day, the author Alain Finkielkraut, born in Paris in 1949 to a family of Polish Jewish origin, was elected to join the group of…
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Fast Forward Connie Francis, 20th-century star turned TikTok sensation, recorded an album of Jewish songs in 1960
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