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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The Banality of Himmler
Heinrich Himmler: Nazi, anti-Semite, lover, husband, father, workaholic. Mass Murderer. The genius of “The Decent One,” Vanessa Lapa’s disturbing new documentary about the man most directly responsible for the extermination of over six million Europeans, mostly Jews but also gypsies, gays and anyone else deemed unworthy by the Nazi regime, is that she in no…
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Why Isn’t Dolph Schayes as Famous as Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg?
● Dolph Schayes and the Rise of Professional Basketball By Dolph Grundman Syracuse University Press, 224 pages, $24.95 Basketball player Dolph Schayes should be as famous as baseball slugger Hank Greenberg. Like Greenberg, Schayes was the first Jewish star in his sport. During his playing career, from 1948 to 1964, Schayes was a 12-time All-Star;…
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Books Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman Tell a Whopper With Everything in It
● The Golem of Hollywood By Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman Putnam Adult, 560 pages, $27.95 Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman’s father-and-son opus, “The Golem of Hollywood,” is as ambitious as it is completely ridiculous — and that’s not altogether a bad thing. The novel’s protagonist captures some of the story’s scale and confusion: Jacob Lev is…
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Where Jonathan Tropper Departs From Reality
As someone who didn’t grow up in the United States, watching Hollywood films can sometimes be tricky; it’s hard to tell what the filmmakers made up and what represents reality. When I moved to the United States two years ago, it wasn’t like I expected to encounter action heroes who never need toilet breaks, background…
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7 Best Scenes From Three Decades of Coen Brother Films
This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, “Blood Simple.” Since then, the pair have written or directed eighteen of the wackiest, funniest, and most memorable movies of all time. Here are seven of the greatest scenes from the Coens’ impressive catalogue: 1. Fargo – “He’s a little guy,…
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In ‘10:04,’ Ben Lerner Sings a Song of Himself
● 10:04 By Ben Lerner 256 pages, Faber and Faber, $25 What is a novel? What purpose does it serve? In what way does the novel engage with the reader and what is the intellectual, emotional, dare I say, ontological texture of the exchange between the two? How much fidelity must a novel show to…
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What Do We Mean by ‘Erev Rosh Hashanah?’
Seth Cohen sends an email from Mamaroneck, New York, accompanied by an Internet link to an English-language advertisement, run in Israel, for a communal “Erev Rosh Hashanah” dinner in Tel Aviv. And Mr. Cohen asks, “Is an expression like erev rosh ha-shanah in the sense of ‘Rosh Hashanah evening’ proper colloquial Israeli Hebrew or an…
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Books Talking With an Angel in Suburban Hell
An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell By Deborah Levy And Other Stories, 96 pages Whether writing with barely suppressed rage or achieving a brisk comic pace, the writing of Deborah Levy rarely lets the reader grow complacent. Her earliest novels, “Beautiful Mutants” and “Swallowing Geography,” channeled Thatcher-era fury through surrealistic modes and landscapes….
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Iowa’s Fields of Midwestern Jewish Dreams
Synagogues in rural Iowa are few and far between for good reason. Out of almost three million residents in the 26th largest state, there are no more than 6,000 Jews, and almost half of them them live in the capital, Des Moines. So few Jews live — and die —in Iowa that the Jewish Funeral…
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The Secret Jewish History of Bruce Springsteen — on His 65th Birthday
As recently as a year ago this past autumn, The New York Times misspelled the Boss’s last name as “Springstein,” reminding those of us old enough to remember that, early in Bruce Springsteen’s career, it was commonly thought — or secretly hoped by some — that this rock ’n’ roll messiah was Jewish. That rumor…
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Hollywood’s Most Misunderstood and Forgotten Jewish Movie Returns
In the face of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, film scholars have long debated about why American moviemakers assiduously avoided dealing with Nazism and anti-Semitism in their films. Some point to the fact that Hollywood studio heads wanted to avoid controversial film fare. Others note that these moguls, most of whom were Jewish,…
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