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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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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Books In Joshua Safran’s Memoir, Jack Kerouac Meets Edgar Allan Poe
Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid By Joshua Safran Hyperion, 288 pages, $24.99 Among the American contributions to world literature, perhaps least appreciated is the genre of automotive horror. To be sure, we are acknowledged to have invented the road trip, which was prophesied by Huck Finn and Lewis and…
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Doris Lessing and the Jews
Doris Lessing, who died on November 17 at age 94, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature for her prolific writings ranging from autobiography to what she called “space fiction.” Sometimes overlooked was the lasting inspiration which Lessing, born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in Persia, drew from Jews and Jewish heritage. In 1925, her…
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Ari Shavit Still Believes in a ‘Promised Land’
Ari Shavit wants to do nothing less than prompt a fresh discourse on Israel, something free and loving, critical and authentic, a conversation that accepts both the miracle and the true consequences of the Jewish state, one that will bring American Jews closer to the real Israel and Israelis closer to their own lost narrative….
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News AIPAC is funneling pro-Israel money to candidates and covering its tracks