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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Errol Morris Probes Notorious Murder
● A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald By Errol Morris The Penguin Press, 544 pages, $29.95 Between the alternative narratives (and universes) presented by the recent political conventions and the cycle of soul searching/forgiveness/redemption of the High Holy Days, it is the perfect moment to reflect on the human and systemic failures…
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Blogging ‘Einstein’
Can’t get enough of Phillip Glass? Here’s a minute-by minute account of ‘Einstein on the Beach,’ now onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 6:56 p.m.: I’m in my seat in the big hall at BAM. The house lights are still up and people are milling about and talking, but that recognizable three-note “Einstein” bass…
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Books Wandering Mother, Wondering Daughter: Part Two
Yesterday, Anne Cherian wrote about visiting the synagogue of the Cochin Jews in India. Her 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: My mother wasn’t the only Jew in our small town in…
The Latest
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Books Monica Lewinsky Plans Tell-All Memoir
Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern whose affair with then-President Bill Clinton shook the country, is reportedly planning to write a kiss-and-tell memoir. Lewinsky, who is turning 40 soon, has told friends she will release love letters she wrote to Clinton and release intimate details of their liaisons, which included sex acts in the Oval…
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Books Wandering Mother, Wondering Daughter
Anne Cherian was born and raised in Jamshedpur, India. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and visits India regularly. Her second book, “The Invitation,” is now available. Her 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,…
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Barbra, Liza and Aretha Honor Marvin Hamlisch
Three of America’s leading stage performers – Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli and Aretha Franklin – paid tribute to Marvin Hamlisch on Tuesday, honoring the late composer for his contributions to Broadway and movies, as well as their personal lives. The invitation-only tribute for the composer of numerous hit records, movies and musicals such as “A…
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Sigmund Freud’s Sister Complex
Freud’s Sister By Goce Smilevski Penguin Books, 272 pages, $16 There is an old maxim that great men are seldom good men. Perhaps no figure of note invites speculation on this question so much as Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Perhaps because of the enormous changes Freud wrought in human self-perception (even the title…
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A Pop Quiz on Philip Glass
A touring production of Philip Glass’s monumental “Einstein on the Beach,” one of a great many tributes that kicked off this year in honor of the 75th birthday of the world’s most famous living composer, arrives this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Glass and his collaborator, avant-garde director and playwright Robert Wilson, called…
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Give Me Liberty or the Tanakh
In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible. By Michael Walzer Yale University Press, 256 pages, $28.00 In the early 1980s, the late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was slugged by many American Jews for what some on the American Jewish center-left perceived as an unsavory embrace of Fundamentalist Christians, who had expressed warm support…
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Zionism and Its Discontents
Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism By Judith Butler Columbia University Press, 256 pages, $27 Judith Butler is not anti-Semitic. I agree with her on that point, which she makes on her publisher’s website. Her new book, “Parting Ways,” represents her attempt to set the record straight regarding her controversial views on Zionism….
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Rebels With a Cause
Though he had no way of knowing it at the time, Seth Rosenfeld was already working on his explosive new book “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power” over three decades ago, before he’d even graduated from college, because of a phone call from his editor at his student newspaper….
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