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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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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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…
The Latest
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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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Books Author Blog: Looking Up in New York
Theodore Ross is the author of “Am I a Jew?: Lost Tribes Lapsed Jews, and One Man’s Search for Himself.” 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: As this is my first…
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Bringing Ibsen Up to Date
Contemporary productions of classical theater can sometimes — or, let’s face it, almost always — feel waxy and dead inside the glass casings of their own pageantry. Watching them can be a tedious ritual, one you submit to with dread. You know the play’s good for you because it’s so boring. That musty thing you…
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Strange Case of a Death in Venice
Isaac Pollak of New York City has sent me a photograph from his private Judaica collection of a late 18th-century engraving by an Italian artist named Giovanni del Pian. Part of it, showing several men emerging from a house to lower a wooden coffin with Hebrew lettering into a gondola, appears alongside this column. At…
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Paul Auster Humanizes Dread in New Book
Winter Journal By Paul Auster Henry Holt and Co., 240 pages, $26 Paul Auster is one of America’s greatest storytellers. An errant phone call, a surprise inheritance, an urge to document every misstep you’ve ever made — Auster’s fiction often begins with unremarkable events and desires, only to end someplace unsettling and unrecognizable. Novels such…
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Books Wandering Mother, Wondering Daughter: Part Three
Earlier this week, Anne Cherian wrote about visiting the synagogue of the Cochin Jews in India and about her own experiences with Judaism. 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: The first…
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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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