Teaneck, New Jersey - Arts and Culture

Arts and Culture

The Puffin Foundation and its Puffin Cultural Forum have been leading supporters and producers of art in Teaneck, sponsoring plays and art exhibitions at it location on Puffin Way.

Teaneck is home to the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, founded in 1953. The Bergen Society is a member organization of the American Ethical Union.

The Teaneck Community Band presents a series of five outdoor summer band concert each summer. The 69th annual series, in 2009, was sponsored by the Puffin Foundation.

The now-defunct Teaneck Cultural Arts Coalition had organized many community-wide cultural events, including an annual First Night community celebration of the arts held for several years through New Year's 2005.

The Garage Theatre Group, Bergen County's first non-profit, professional theatre company, stages fully professional productions, with members of Actors Equity, as well as youth conservatory productions at the Becton Theatre on the campus of Farleigh Dickinson University.

Teaneck New Theatre, founded in 1986, performs productions at St. Mark's Church in Teaneck and at the Hackensack Cultural Arts Center, across the river in Hackensack, New Jersey.

Cedar Lane Cinema is the township's lone movie theater, and hosts live performances on its stage by local performance groups. Teaneck has been the site of many films, including The Family Man, the 2000 film starring Nicolas Cage. The Teaneck Armory has been used for films including Sweet and Lowdown, and for interior scenes of You've Got Mail.

In 2007, two non-fiction volumes appeared dealing, inter alia, with Teaneck's Orthodox Jewish community. In Foreskin's Lament, writer Shalom Auslander describes living in Teaneck and finding the Jewish community stifling and claustrophobic. In contrast, Rifka Rosenwein, in Life in the Present Tense, describes the close-knit community as a gift she couldn't imagine when living in Manhattan.