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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Into Eye of Bob Dylan’s ‘Tempest’
When listening to a new Bob Dylan album, is it possible to hear it in and of itself? Or are we destined to hear only Dylan against Dylan? And if so, how can anything new hold up against those first thrilling chords of “The Times They Are a-Changin’”? Or Dylan gone electric — the ecstatic,…
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Bob Dylan’s 10 Most Jewish Songs
While Bob Dylan has, throughout his life and career, engaged in all sorts of mythologizing and playful biographical falsification, it has never been in the service of denying his heritage. This son of a middle-class appliance salesman from the Upper Midwest, who grew up with a Yiddish-speaking grandmother down the hallway in an extended Jewish…
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Shelter From the Storm
During the holiday of Sukkot, one adds a small prayer when saying the birkat ha-mazon, the Grace After Meals. It goes, Ha-rah. aman yakim lanu et sukkat David ha-nofelet, “May the Merciful One [that is, God] raise up the fallen sukkah of David.” I’ve often wondered what exactly this referred to, and this year I…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: Mr. Expert on God
Earlier this week, Theodore Ross wrote about the Manhattan eruv and a revision for his paperback. 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: One of the strange, but nice, things that come…
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Lewis Gittler Brought Refugee Lives to Screen
The first time I saw Wendy Gittler, she was carrying her husband, Henry Tylbor, in his wheelchair down a narrow, crowded flight of stairs at the New York Studio School, on East 8th Street in Manhattan. Tylbor was the youngest survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had known Majdanek and other concentration camps. He…
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Books Author Blog: Revisions for the Paperback
Earlier this week, Theodore Ross wrote about the Manhattan eruv. 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 found my first error in my book in this sentence in the introductory chapter,…
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Books Mulling Over Monica Lewinsky
When word leaked out in late September that Monica Lewinsky was writing a tell-all book, the story shot to the top of the “most read” list on our website within hours. We reported that, according to the New York Post, Lewinsky — the world’s most famous, and infamous, White House intern — had secured a…
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Ed Asner’s Still Crusty After All These Years
Ed Asner was seated in a makeshift living room in a large, garishly lit rehearsal studio in the Snapple Theater on West 50th Street that formerly housed a beauty school. He had just emerged from a costume fitting and was eager to discuss “Grace,” Craig Wright’s new play about the misadventures of an innocent young…
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Zero Mostel’s Long Shadow on ‘Rhino’
As part of its 30th Next Wave Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will be showcasing Eugène Ionesco’s classic absurdist play “Rhinoceros.” The critically acclaimed production, performed in the original French by Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville under the direction of Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, represents an all too rare occasion to see a this ebullient and…
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Learning To Be Good From The Ethics Master
Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything By Randy Cohen Chronicle Books, 320 pages, $24.95 I’ve been assigned to write a review of “Be Good: How To Navigate the Ethics of Everything,” a compilation of columns by former New York Times “Ethicist” Randy Cohen. While I wouldn’t say I’m friends with Cohen —…
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A Life From Stem to Stern
In Gerald Stern’s latest work, there seems to be a new urgency. One of the most important poets of his generation, winner of both the National Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award and a friend and contemporary of Allen Ginsberg and Philip Levine, he still seems to be hurtling toward the reader at…
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