Adam Langer is the Forward’s executive editor. Born and raised in Chicago, he is the author of the novels Crossing California, The Washington Story, Ellington Boulevard, The Thieves of Manhattan, The Salinger Contract and Cyclorama, as well as the memoir My Father’s Bonus March.
Adam LangerCulture Editor
By Adam Langer
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Film & TV ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Is Surprisingly Good to the Jews
One of the more surprising aspects of “Straight Outta Compton” — F. Gary Gray’s propulsive and vibrant, if rather disjointed, film about the rise and fall of the seminal rap group N.W.A — is how dainty it is when it comes to portraying Jews and anti-Semitism. Whatever its merits and shortcomings, like the music it…
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Culture If You Take a 10-Year-Old To See a Shakespeare Play
If you take a 10-year-old to see a Shakespeare play, chances are she’ll want to know how long the show is. You’ll tell her you don’t know for sure, but three hours would be a good guess. Before she rolls her eyes, you’ll remind her that the production of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the…
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Film & TV How Woody Allen Lost Me
Here’s a free idea for a play. Or maybe it’s just a skit. I was thinking of writing it a while back, but the premise seemed thin, so I set it aside. It’s a light comedy, circa 1970-something. A young, neurotic film critic — just getting out of yet another bad relationship — is visited…
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Culture I Went To New Hampshire To Buy J.D. Salinger’s House
I have traveled to Cornish, New Hampshire, with the intention of buying J.D. Salinger’s house. Last year, when the house went on the market, it was listed for $679,000, but now Jane Darrach, the real estate agent for the property, has told me the price has dropped to “585-ish.” It seems like a lot of…
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Art Was This Really Television’s Golden Age?
Halfway through my visit to the Jewish Museum, someone thought to turn down the Barbra Streisand. Or maybe I just got used to it. Either way, it was a blessing. For, the sound of Babs belting out the Peter Matz tune “Gotta Move,” from her 1966 CBS TV special, “Color Me Barbra,” threatened to drown…
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Culture A Tale of Two Netanyahus, One Play and One Speech
About a third of the way into “A Happy End” — Iddo Netanyahu’s play about a Jewish physicist’s family that naively chooses to remain in Berlin in the 1930’s — there’s a brief discussion about the impossibility of simultaneity. Young Hans Erdman reveals to his parents, Mark and Leah Erdman, that his anti-Semitic high school…
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Opinion Guide to Israeli Elections as Read by a MacBook
MacBook’s Dictation function / Apple So, while messing around with my MacBook Pro, I must have inadvertently hit the “fn” button twice, thus triggering the computer’s Dictation function. I’d never tried it before, so I spoke a few sentences into it. It’s actually astoundingly good at converting speech into text. In advance of the upcoming…
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Culture When Dylan Does It Better Than Sinatra (Assuming You Don’t Care For Sinatra)
So you know where I’m coming from, I never got the whole Frank Sinatra thing. “On the Town?” Yeah, I liked that. “From Here to Eternity?” Sure, that too. But the whole tough guy “I’ll sock you in the jaw” persona has always been a turn-off. When Apple put him on its “Think Different” posters,…
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