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
Remembering Herman Taube, Witness to a Vanished World
Herman Taube, a novelist, poet and longtime Washington correspondent for the Forverts, died March 25 in Rockville, Maryland. He was 96. Born on February 2, 1918, in Lodz, Poland, Taube was orphaned at a young age and was raised by his grandparents, Mirle and Gershon Mandel. In an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial…
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Why Woody Allen’s ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ Is a Bright Shining Lie
The plot of “Bullets over Broadway,” the new musical by Woody Allen (with essential help from director Susan Stroman and music “adaptor” and lyrics tweaker Glen Kelly), is built around an elaborate setup. David Shayne, a Greenwich Village artiste in the vein of Eugene O’Neill, discovers to his astonishment that one of his experimental, symbol-laden…
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How Wes Anderson Became a Jewish Emigré Director in ‘Budapest Hotel’
An elaborately constructed caper set in a fairy-tale Europe on the eve of World War II, Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is many things: a wild tumble through another of the director’s painstakingly designed imaginary worlds; a gleefully overstuffed ensemble piece with an all-star cast; and a near-perfect combination of sophistication and silliness. It…
The Latest
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The Secret Jewish History of the Coffee Cup (Starbucks and Otherwise)
In the Talmud (Eruvin 65b), Rabbi Ilai cleverly opines: “A person is recognized by three things: their cup, their pocket, and their anger.” In other words, how they handle their liquor (self control), their money (generosity), and their temper (patience). It’s a lot more poetic in the Hebrew, where the three characteristics are, “koso, kiso,…
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Hadar Offers Orthodox Women a Glossy Magazine of Their Own
(Haaretz) — Think Vogue, circa 1929 – a drawn silhouette of a fashionably, but conservatively, dressed woman, holding a weekend bag. A women’s fashion magazine without a celebrity on the cover is a real rarity today, what with Kanye and Kim peering from newsstands this month – but Hadar Magazine, a new publication for Orthodox…
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Books Rock Journalism and Mick Jagger’s Shoes
When Lisa Robinson name-checks Elton, Mick and Iggy, it sounds completely natural. It should; through four decades, the legendary music journalist has been nearly as pivotal a pop figure as her subjects. Robinson famously introduced David Bowie to Iggy Pop, helped The Clash and Elvis Costello score record deals, and hung out with the Beatles….
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How the Son of German and Polish Jews Became the ‘Starchild’ of KISS
● Face The Music: A Life Exposed By Paul Stanley HarperOne, 480 pages, $28.99 I’ll admit that I was a little late to the KISS party. In the mid-1970s, while most of my elementary school friends were cranking “Destroyer” and ooh-ing and ah-ing over the photo booklets from “Alive!” and “Alive II,” I was gravitating…
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The Secret Jewish History of Tax Day
Like it or not — and who among us actually likes it — come April 15, you will need to have filed your 2013 income tax return with the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps one way to feel better about the painful and often inconvenient process is to recognize that it has roots in the biblical…
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Getting to the Heart and Sole of the Matter
Shelly Rosen, who grew up living with grandparents who spoke to her in Yiddish, writes that Yiddish words from those days are still popping up in her head — the latest of which is padeshve, which she thinks means “the sole or arched part of the bottom of my foot.” And she asks, “Did I…
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The Syrupy Tale of How Jews Invented Kedem and Modern America
Pour yourself a glass of wine — this is a story that needs a little extra time set aside. It’s a twisty tale of three centuries, and how improbable connections made New York City into the city it is today, and how difficult it is to keep moving forward without destroying what lies behind. Let’s begin then,…
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The Most Beautiful Haggadah in the Room
Tens of thousands of copies of “The Szyk Haggadah” have been read at Passover Seders around the world; but the original pages of the book, hand-lettered and hand-painted in the 1930s, have not been shown in public for 60 years. Now all 48 watercolors and gouaches created by a brilliant Polish-born illustrator can be seen…
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