Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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Film & TV In ‘The Rehearsal’ season 2, is Nathan Fielder serious?
The comedian is out to solve an epidemic of airplane crashes — will the world listen?
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Books Celebrate Nowruz with these books by Iranian Jewish women
There’s a long history of women writing as a feminist act. For someone to declare the social value of their experiences — either through fiction, or in memoir, written with a strong “I” — is almost inherently activist. For Iranian Jewish women, who come from a culture that doesn’t always encourage their expression, literature can…
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April 5: The Forverts at 125: The Expanding Audience and Innovation of Our Storied Yiddish Publication
Special Donor-Only Event We are thrilled to host this special, donor-only event on April 5 at 7 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. PT. On April 5, join the Forward’s Yiddish Editor, Rukhl Schaechter, and her assistant, Rabbi Zachary Golden, to learn about the exciting developments in the world of the Yiddish Forverts. Here at The…
The Latest
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Jews are joining the fight to defend Ukraine — we’ve been here before
On February 26, just two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel issued an invitation to its “dear compatriots, brothers and all caring citizens of Israel.” This was an unusual invitation: it was directed to all of those “who wish to participate in combat actions against the Russian aggressor. The response…
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A Rikers Island Purim story: Finding God behind the gates
A Jewish corrections officer finds a way to observe the holiday — and share the mitzvah
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In Zelenskyy’s Mordechai-like Purim plea, Biden is as uneasy as Esther
Centuries ago, in a story we tell each year on this night, a plea was made to someone with access to power, but who faced no small risk. “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace,” Mordechai, a Jew living in Persia told…
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Five costumes for this year’s combination Purim and St. Patrick’s Day
At various points in history, Jewish and Irish immigrants filled the tenements of New York City. Both were poor, foreign groups looked down upon by the rest of America. We’ve come a long way from those days, but Jewish and Irish people still share something important — the tradition of getting wasted once a year…
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In a delightful new Purim film, Esther is a secret agent in Argentina
In its long history, the Purim story has had its fair share of reboots. Because, in every generation, a new Haman arrives to oppress us, that genocidal adviser has worn the face of Hitler and, when Stalin suffered a stroke on Purim, averting his own dire plans for Jews, he wore a different mustache entirely….
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Negotiating between heroism and collaboration, a kindergarten teacher sought to save lives in the Holocaust
The Nazis Knew My Name By Magda Hellinger with Maya Lee and David Brewster Atria Books, 320 pages, $27 In his 1986 essay collection, “The Drowned and the Saved,” Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Primo Levi famously discussed a “grey zone” of moral “ambiguity and compromise” during the Holocaust. Among its inhabitants, he suggested, were concentration camp prisoners…
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Barry Manilow on dueling cantors, Levy’s Rye and his musical’s New York debut
Barry Manilow never meant to become a pop star, and his Grammy, Emmy and Tony-winning career as a songwriter is a source of perennial tsuris for his lyric-writing partner Bruce Sussman. If you ask them, “Mandy” came, gave and (forget what you heard) did some taking. That breakout hit diverted the pair’s original ambition: writing…
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The secret Jewish history of Carson McCullers
About one-third of the way through Suzanne Vega’s terrific new one-woman film, “Lover, Beloved,” about the life of great 20th-century American writer Carson McCullers, the folk-pop singer-songwriter – playing McCullers in a tour de force of acting (and singing) – says, as McCullers, “I wanted to write about a Jew. You see, because, we are…
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What would Otto Frank tell Anne about Charlottesville? A new play tells us.
Roger Guenveur Smith had been meaning to play Anne Frank’s father for some time – but first he had to embody someone quite different. “I was finally ready to really dive into the archives, and lo and behold, we lost Rodney King,” said Smith, who performed a one-man show as King, the Black victim of…
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