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
A Jewish Thanksgiving in Avalon
Earlier, Harry Brod wrote about how Jews don’t have a “middle range,” speaking backwards, a couple of sayings with which he disagrees, and why he always has a valid passport. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information…
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Aldo Finzi’s Masterwork Debuts 70 Years Later
Moments before he passed away, in 1945, composer Aldo Finzi whispered the words, “Fate suonare la mia musica” (“Let my music be performed”). Recently, on a particularly cold December night, his last and greatest wish was fulfilled in the 19th-century Donizetti Theatre in Bergamo, less than 35 miles away from the legendary La Scala Opera…
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Books ‘Mad’ Founder’s War Comics
Corpse on the Imjin! And Other Stories By Harvey Kurtzman, Edited by Gary Groth Fantagraphics, 227 pages, $28.99 Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) is today remembered as the Bronx-born genius editor who invented Mad Magazine, the most pervasive satirical influence of the 20th century. That single claim-to-fame is hard to avoid, but Kurtzman’s larger role in the…
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Books Author Blog: No Middle Range
Earlier, Harry Brod wrote about speaking backwards a couple of sayings with which he disagrees and why he always has a valid passport. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: “Jews don’t…
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Books Author Blog: Speaking Backwards
Earlier, Harry Brod wrote about a couple of sayings with which he disagrees and why he always has a valid passport. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: I’ve been told that…
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‘Elephant’ Woman Meets ‘Elephant’ Man
Kenneth Sherman’s collection of poems “Words For Elephant Man” was first published in 1983 and has just been rereleased by Porcupine’s Quill. It reads with the richness typical of a painting or a novel — so moving at times that I found myself weeping. It is hard to keep in mind that one is not…
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Of Hobbits and The Golem
Sometimes, a bearded, money-grubbing dwarf is just a bearded, money-grubbing dwarf and not an evil, anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews. Undoubtedly some will view “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” — the first in a trilogy of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book “The Hobbit,” directed by Peter Jackson — and find in Tolkien’s mythical creatures not-so-subtly…
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When To Call a Schmuck a Schmuck
What or who is a Schmuck anyway?
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Looking Back: December 28, 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Each Friday evening in Manhattan, Nathan Friedman preaches against the “sinful Jews.” Formerly a Jew himself, Friedman is a missionary who invites Jews into his little storefront church and attempts to get them to convert to Christianity. When 17-year-old Paulina Rothberg stood outside Friedman’s church on a recent Friday night, she…
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How David Mamet Abandoned His Art
Posted outside the Golden Theater on 45th Street — where, until recently, David Mamet’s newest play, “The Anarchist,” was running right down the block from his masterpiece, “Glengarry Glen Ross” — is the full text of an opinion piece Mamet wrote for The New York Times in November entitled “Considering the Excesses of Protest.” In…
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Patrizia von Brandenstein’s Designs On David Mamet
For Academy Award-winning designer Patrizia von Brandenstein, the process of designing “The Anarchist” began with a series of exchanges with the drama’s author David Mamet. A visual consultant on the Mamet-scripted film “The Untouchables,” von Brandenstein more recently designed a not-yet-aired HBO biopic about Phil Spector that Mamet wrote and directed. “Mamet and I got…
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