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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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…
The Latest
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Jewish Civil Rights Activists Killed in Mississippi
1914 • 100 years ago Bagel Monopoly of Norfolk Street Anyone who hangs around the corner of New York City’s Hester and Norfolk Streets at about 5 a.m. knows of the boisterous baked-good market there, where Jews and Jewesses sell all manner of challahs, cakes, rolls and all kinds of other good things. This writer…
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‘Bearded Lady’ and ‘Gender Terrorist’ Take Performance Art Beyond the Fringes
Stomping across the stage in a disheveled blond wig, cheesy pink boots, and a jean skirt adorned with raccoon tails, performance artist Rose Wood is every bit the trailer-park hooker attempting to sell her wares. Enraged and desperate, she strips off her torn and tied T-shirt, revealing nude breasts, and when that doesn’t work, she…
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What’s the Difference Between Mass Killing and Genocide?
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about “neo-Nazi” as a term for anti-Arab hooligans among Israel’s settler population, explaining why I thought it inappropriate. Because the Nazis, I said, have rightly come to represent the ultimate in monstrously hateful human conduct, it has become common to invoke them in condemning all forms of violent…
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How We Know the Bible Was Written by Human Hands
● How the Bible Became Holy By Michael Satlow Yale University Press, 368 pages, $35 ● The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis By Joel Baden Yale University Press, 392 pages, $65 ● The Formation of the Hebrew Canon By Timothy Lim Yale University Press, 304 pages, $45 According to a Gallup poll…
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Books Is the U.S. Getting Better at Soccer?
Getty Images As Team USA carries the hopes of the English-speaking world in Brazil, inquiring minds are wondering why England is so perennially terrible at the sport it invented (and let’s not get started on cricket). It is a question that was surprisingly well answered in 2009, along with the corollary question about how America…
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Kafkaesque ‘Wild Tales’ Is Jewish Film from Argentina Inspired by Steven Spielberg
‘Why did you ruin a perfectly good Jewish wedding?” The question is addressed to Damián Szifrón, the 38-year-old director of “Relatos Salvajes” (“Wild Tales”), the Argentinian film that competed at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. He seems caught off guard. Indeed, it’s unlikely that many of the audience members recognized the amped-up version of “Havenu…
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Books From One Soccer Writer to Another
There are two Jonathan Wilsons writing about soccer in a knowledgeable way. One is Jonathan Wilson from the Guardian, arguably the foremost journalistic expert on tactics in the modern game, the other is Jonathan Wilson, the Tufts University Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, who covered the 1994 World Cup for The New Yorker and…
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Books Jewish Roots of the ‘Beautiful Game’
British Jews have never accounted for more than 1% of the population. And their contribution to soccer has always been obscured. But, in his well-researched and compellingly-written history, “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The History of Football’s Forgotten Tribe,” Anthony Clavane explains the outsize contribution of British Jews to British soccer and their pivotal…
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