Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Imagining Life of Dona Gracia, Portuguese Jew and Richest Woman in World
(Haaretz) — About 10 years ago, while visiting the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris, Israeli journalist Naomi Keren noticed an ancient silver medallion that bore the likeness of Dona Gracia Nasi. “I was taken aback,” Keren says. “What I saw contradicted everything I knew about the use of art in connection with…
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Will the Real Sholem Aleichem Please Stand Up?
The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye By Jeremy Dauber Schocken, 464 pages, $28.95 Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ By Alisa Solomon Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32.00 Like most Jews of my generation, I saw “Fiddler on the Roof” before…
The Latest
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How an Affront to Judaism Came To Memorialize Israel’s War Dead
Charles Krauthamer writes from Teaneck, N.J.: “While reading a spy novel set in Salonika, I came across the word andarta as a term for Greek highlanders who fought as guerrillas against the Turks [in Greece’s early-19th-century War of Independence]. And while in Israel, I saw many monuments commemorating fallen soldiers, each called an andarta, too….
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Celebrating 200 Years of French-Jewish Composer Charles Valentin-Alkan
This month marks the bicentenary of the French Jewish composer and pianist Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888). A new biography was published earlier this year in France, written by two devotees, Brigitte François-Sappey and François Luguenot. And pianists such as Pascal Amoyel and Alessandro Deljavan, have released recordings of his work, which range from the resolutely virtuosic…
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Israeli Government Declares a Mourning Period After Kennedy Assassination
1913 •100 years ago Fight on the Lower East Side Pushcart peddler David Levine was wounded during a gunfight that took place on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A witness told reporters that two young men were fighting with a group of people when one of the group members pulled out a revolver and started shooting….
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How ‘Stars of David’ Made Leap From Page to Stage
I’m hesitant to admit that I believe in the concept of bashert, the notion that something was inevitable or orchestrated. But I also think it’s no accident that I’ve landed at this entirely unexpected juncture, where my childhood obsession with theater has joined my adult profession as a writer and fueled the Jewish exploration that…
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It’s Not Easy Being a Jewish Artist in a Muslim Land
Venturing into global conflict zones, some of which are Muslim, can be challenging to Jewish theater artists. Consider this: Two artists were willing to speak with the Forward about their experiences, while eight others who had traveled — or were about to travel —into Muslim hotspots did not want to participate in this story or…
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How a Schlumpy Kid Named Art Spiegelman Changed Pop Culture
Like a handful of other artists and thinkers of the past 50 years — Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg come to mind — Art Spiegelman has transformed the medium in which he works so radically, and influenced the artists following in his shadow so completely, that society itself has been altered….
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Masada Stubbornly Gives Up Its Secrets — Lice and All — After 50 Years
(Haaretz) — It looks like an ordinary lice comb, with wider teeth on one side for untangling knots and finer teeth on the other for removing nits. Except that this one happens to be made of wood, rather than metal. And it also happens to be about 2,000 years old. Holding the recently unearthed artifact…
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My Dinner With Leonard Bernstein
Although marred by unexplained omissions and bowdlerizations, the publication of “The Leonard Bernstein Letters” brought to mind a dinner I attended at Bernstein’s Fairfield, Conn., home around 30 years ago. Unlike the interviewer, Jonathan Cott, author of “Dinner With Lenny: The Last Long Interview With Leonard Bernstein,” I did not ask the maestro any portentous…
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Film & TV We Are All the ‘Other Israel’
At some point in the evolution of American national thought Martin Luther King Jr. went from being a political firebrand to being a national icon. You have to be pretty far outside the mainstream in 2013 to object to Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Likewise the Other Israel Film Festival started out as a way…
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