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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A way to forgive debts and leave fields fallow — even if you’re not a farmer in Israel
What’s the best way to observe the shmita year? Perhaps a seven stranded havdalah candle, or a special set of bowls — we use special dishes for Passover, after all. For those of us who don’t work in agriculture, shmita can be easily overlooked. But “The Shmita Project,” a new exhibit at the Osher Marin…
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Johanna Kaplan’s short stories and Olga Tokarczuk’s (very) long novel: The Jewish books you need to read this month
Welcome to Forward Reads, your monthly tour of the Jewish literary landscape. I’m Irene Katz Connelly, a culture writer at the Forward, and I spend a lot of time combing through new releases so you can read the best books out there. This article originally ran in newsletter form. To sign up for Forward Reads…
The Latest
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Gary Shteyngart on working in bed, writing from life and funding his pistachio addiction
It’s hard to know exactly how to feel while reading “Our Country Friends,” Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel. On one hand, it’s an indisputably funny book. (If you read it on the subway, prepare to freak out your neighbors by laughing loudly and often.) Set in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the novel follows…
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Do the Madrigals from Disney’s ‘Encanto’ descend from Sephardic Jews?
While I was watching “Encanto,” I wondered if its magical Madrigals, the family at the heart of the Oscar-nominated Disney animated film, were Jewish. They’re close-knit to the point of being smothering. They’re successful yet grappling with generations of pain. And their powers come from a candle that has miraculously burned for 50 years —…
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2022’s Oscar nominees are full of Jewish connections
This week’s parsha concerns God’s instructions to the Israelites in the wilderness on the design of priestly temple garments, how to properly light the menorah and how to build the golden altar of incense. So perhaps it’s fitting that the Moses-y desert parable “Dune” is now nominated for the Oscar gold in costume design, cinematography…
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In the post-Anthony Weiner and Harvey Weinstein era, a battle against sexual, moral and viral contagions
Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis By Laura Kipnis Pantheon, 210 pages, $26 Enmeshed in a seemingly endless pandemic, we’ve all become amateur epidemiologists, as Laura Kipnis notes, even if we’re not all equally adept at it. In Kipnis’s latest book, she harnesses her caustic prose and scathing wit to another amateur pursuit:…
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Are you ready for season four of ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel?’
Midge Maisel has come a long way since we first met her in a basement comedy club in Greenwich Village, her picture-perfect marriage and picture-perfect life falling apart in real time. Now she’s gone on tour, done shows in Las Vegas and…her life is still falling apart. But in a new way! The fourth season…
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Why Jimmy Cagney spoke better Yiddish than just about any other actor in Hollywood
Of all movie scenes in Yiddish, one of the most popular — that of an increasingly agitated man who vainly attempts to make a clueless Irish cop understand his desire to reach Ellis Island — is not from a Yiddish film, but from “Taxi!” a 1932 film starring Jimmy Cagney. The previous year, Cagney had…
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She’s found a new way to keep Holocaust stories alive — one step at a time
There’s a moment in Elie Wiesel’s “Night” that seared itself into Rachel Linsky’s consciousness in the spring of 2020. Wiesel and his family have just arrived at Auschwitz. Twice, Wiesel and his father move to the left, first away from his mother and sisters and then toward an unknown fate: either the crematoria or the…
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When Harpo spoke — to save a relative from World War II Europe
In March of 1941, a 72-year-old German Jewish widow named Helene Schickler was waiting to join her family in the U.S. She was then living in a convent in Naples with other refugees, and the nuns hosting them were running out of food. She was losing weight, strength and hope. A doctor came to examine…
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‘Hatzaad Harishon’ broke barriers – until race, identity questions proved too much
This article is an edited excerpt from from Janice W. Fernheimer’s book, “Stepping Into Zion: Hatzaad Harishon, Black Jews, and the Remaking of Jewish Identity,” (University of Alabama Press 2014). For the first years of its short existence, Hatzaad Harishon successfully created opportunities for Blacks who identified as Jews but who may not have been…
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