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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Babyn Yar, Putin’s war in Ukraine, and the paintings my grandfather never got to see exhibited
When Russian bombs fell on the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial in Kyiv the other day, killing more people on top of the tens of thousands slaughtered there by the Nazis, it was an especially painful moment for me. I had been invited to have my grandfather’s paintings – the first artistic renditions of the massacre…
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How Jewish women pioneered the fitness movement (for better and worse)
The women appear perfectly coiffed, makeup impeccable. They’re dressed in shorts, blouses, light sweaters and earrings to match. You might think they were headed off to a picnic in the park. But no, it’s 1958 and they’ve arrived at a calisthenics or “figure-shaping” class. Well, actually this is a fictionalized recreation of what women’s group…
The Latest
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What to watch, listen and read to understand the war in Ukraine
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began February 24, is the largest military action in Europe since WWII. Yet it can be difficult to parse breaking news without an understanding of the history behind it. If you’re looking to deepen your understanding of the situation on the ground, this round-up of things to read, watch and…
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Architect of memorial synagogue at Babyn Yar: Bombing “leaves me speechless, numb and powerless”
In May, the Forward spoke to architect Manuel Herz about a new synagogue he’d designed at the site of Babyn Yar (for years commonly referred to as Babi Yar), where SS officers and Ukrainian allies murdered 34,000 Jews in 1941. Herz modeled the structure after the colorful wooden synagogues that once dotted the Pale of…
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What ‘The Merchant of Venice’ loses when no one laughs
Clothes do a lot of work in Arin Arbus’s new staging of “The Merchant of Venice.” Antonio (Alfredo Narciso), the play’s titular merchant, dresses like a tech founder just back from some problematic retreat: black blazer, ostentatious cross, too-white velcro sneakers. The heiress Portia (a sprightly Isabel Arraiza) issues commands to her underlings while prancing…
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Poets join together for Ukraine
Over 800 people from all over the world came to hear Ukrainian poetry in the original and in translation in a swiftly organized online reading to support writers whose lives are in danger as Russian forces approach. The event, part of a virtual reading series by Words Together Words Apart, offered a window into the…
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Shunned no more? Alan Dershowitz joins Cameo to build a Martha’s Vineyard Chabad house
More Jews than ever are coming to Martha’s Vineyard; Alan Dershowitz doesn’t seem to have many friends among them. In a stroke of genius, the criminal defense attorney is hoping to fill both his needs and the needs of his coreligionists by doing his favorite thing: pontificating on camera. Yes, Dershowitz has a Cameo account…
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As Putin lays siege to Ukraine, memories of life between wars
If you aren’t thinking about a place at all, and then a war starts there, it seems like it came out of the blue — a maniac starts the war; a bunch of people die; the rest of us post on our social media. But wars don’t “break out.” They ripen in plain sight until…
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Online, Zelenskyy has become a sex symbol. It’s getting weird.
“I know this is not the time, but I have the biggest crush on this man,” one commenter admitted. The video in question? Ukrainian president and former comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy, now stony-faced, speaking to the press amidst Russian attacks. During times of great crisis — and we’ve had plenty in the past two years —…
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How a career in performance prepared Volodymyr Zelenskyy for this moment in Ukraine
One of Karl Marx’s best-known lines appears in “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” his merciless vivisection of the revolution of 1848 in France. Torn between crying and laughing at the words and actions of the French revolutionaries, who seemed to see themselves as characters in a remake of the earlier revolution of 1789, Marx panned their performance….
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In Ukraine, a long history of Russian crimes against Jews
Tragic events now unfolding in Ukraine echo a history of Russian human rights offenses against Jews in that country. Just over a century ago, between 1918 and 1921, tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were murdered, tortured and raped in hundreds of pogroms by marauders, some of them Russian. Historians place the number of people…
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