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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Film & TV
Remembering the Life and Films of Paul Mazursky
The critic Irving Howe was not thinking of the writer-director Paul Mazursky, who has died at the age of 84, when he wrote of Jewish humor: “Laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relation between the two.” Yet he might as well have been. Born Irwin Mazursky…
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Israel and Circumcision Top List of Concerns in New ‘Pewish’ Plays
The Pew Survey of American Jewry came as a shock to the chattering classes (or kibbitzing classes) of professional Jews, the pundits, academics and culture boosters that make a living by analyzing or promoting Judaism, myself included. Of course, anybody with eyes could see that interest in the religion has dwindled and many American Jews…
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Hey Baby, It’s the 4th Of Jew-ly!
When it comes to popular patriotic American songs written by Jews, “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin certainly stands at the top of the list; it isn’t, on the other hand, particularly festive. If you want to soundtrack your Fourth of July cookout with tunes by Jewish artists that are appropriately star-spangled, and haven’t already…
The Latest
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Music African Migrants Camp Out at Egypt Border After Israeli Detention Walk-Out
More than 1,000 illegal African migrants have been camping out near the border with Egypt to protest their treatment in Israel. The migrants walked out of Israel’s Holot detention center on Friday, and attempted to cross into Egypt, according to reports. The Israel Defense Forces prevented them from crossing the border. The migrants, mostly from…
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Circassian: A Most Difficult Language
The other day, I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office in Haifa, when three people walked in and sat behind me. Two were men dressed in Western clothes, one looking to be in his 30s and the other in his 50s or 60s; the third was a woman in her 20s of…
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A Holocaust Romance Tied to a Necklace, Filled With Clichés
Love and Treasure By Ayelet Waldman Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95 A historical novel, the Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács argued, should reach only as far backwards as the era of the author’s grandparents. That is because novelists build not balanced panoramas, but rather individual portraits. Real human beings are unrealistic, because they are improbably idiosyncratic….
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Palestine Jews on Lockdown Following Violence
1914 • 100 years ago Betrayed by Sister and Husband Nine years ago, Sam and Ida Weiner were married and living happily in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he worked as a carpenter in a trim factory. The Weiners had three lovely children: 7-year-old Rosie, 5-year-old Sam and 2-year-old Saraleh. About nine months ago,…
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Books Yiddish Tomes Go Digital With DIY Scanner
It’s a scenario that the Yiddish writers of yore could never have predicted, and yet by which they likely would have been tickled: Today, their work is being digitized with the help of a home-made scanner built by a former Baptist from Indiana who lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. As of mid…
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An Empty Bob Dylan Biography
Dylan: The Biography By Dennis McDougal Turner Publishing Company, 540 pages, $35 ‘What is this sh–?” Greil Marcus famously asked in his Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan’s most reviled album, “Self Portrait.” Throughout my reading of “Dylan: The Biography,” by Dennis McDougal, I’ve been asking myself the same question. It purports to be “the…
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Eli Wallach’s 10 Greatest Roles (A Completely Biased List)
Eli Wallach, who died yesterday at 98, once joked that he had played hundreds of roles onstage and in movies, but was perhaps most remembered for playing the role of the villain Mr. Freeze on the old “Batman” TV series. Although Wallach’s “Batman” turn was a memorable one, we’ve cho]sen to look back at some…
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A Remembrance of Eli Wallach
I first met Eli Wallach one evening in a restaurant in the Peninsula Hotel. He was almost 90 then, and he needed someone to edit the autobiography he was writing. We sipped chamomile tea and he told me some of his stories — how he had gone out dancing with Marilyn Monroe; how he had…
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