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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In the story of Ethiopian Jewish immigration, is Israel really the hero?
When we hear about racism or discrimination in Israel, it is usually about Jewish-Arab relations. It is far more rare that we hear the complicated story of Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community, who also face discrimination in the country. Usually, if we hear anything about their plight, we hear of Israel heroically airlifting thousands…
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The best Jewish TV, movies and books to look out for in 2022
2020 and 2021 will likely not be remembered as the most enjoyable years in American history, but if 2022 turns out to also be a dud, at least there will still be lots of fresh reading and viewing material for us to engage with from our childhood bedrooms and underground bunkers. The year brings the…
The Latest
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For Jews, Texas is beginning to look more like France (that’s not a good thing)
This week marked the start of spring semester at my place of work, the University of Houston. In one of my classes, devoted to the French Enlightenment, I launched into my rather tired explanation why it was important to understand this era. I told my students that so much that our world has since witnessed…
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Is it possible to love the world’s most ubiquitous Jewish intellectual as much as he loves himself?
One of the sweetest privileges of living in the United States of America is the ability to go decades without knowing what a “Bernard-Henri Lévy” is. My own honeymoon of ignorance ended a few years back, when the latest storm of Roman Polanski takes swept across the internet and it came to my attention that…
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In Nazi-looted art case at Supreme Court, one (brief) moment of levity
Despite being mired in legalese, the oral argument at the Supreme Court for the case Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation regarding the Nazi-looted Camille Pissarro painting had one moment of levity. About an hour in, Justice Stephen Breyer asked, “Can everyone agree that this is a beautiful painting?” It was the first direct mention of…
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For more than a century, a Jewish artist from Auschwitz reveled in nature and visual delight
Tova Berlinski, who died Jan. 16 at age 106, proved that where Jewish artists are born is less important than what they create from those origins. Berlinski’s hometown was Oświęcim, which then belonged to the Habsburg Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and is now part of Poland. She later described the town to interviewers as…
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How a Bronx kid with stage fright reinvented himself as the great sage of Jewish history
The French historian Sylvie Anne Goldberg is author of “Clepsydra: Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism” and “Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague.” Her “Transmitting Jewish History” collects autobiographical conversations with the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Recently, Professor Goldberg discussed with Benjamin Ivry, who translated…
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Once a Jewish hero of the counterculture, Aron Kay looks back on his pie-throwing days
At the end of a 1995 oral history recorded for the USC Shoah Foundation, Holocaust survivor Mary Kay was asked about her children and grandchildren. When she got to her eldest son, she indicated that he lived in New York but declared, “I can’t tell you what he does.” Kay was not about to kvell…
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On the far right, there are no contradictions, only virulent antisemitism — a front-row view of Charlottesville
The dramatic 16-day courtroom trial, which ended with a whopping $26 million in damages assessed to more than a dozen individual white supremacists and hate groups for their role in the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, also offered a window onto what’s really happening inside today’s far right. Among the courtroom observers…
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Forty years later, one Jew’s apocalyptic fears look a lot like prophecies
After the Nazis exterminated a third of European Jewry, surviving remnants of many Jewish communities fled to America. Of those, many came to New York City. And a disproportionate number came to the Boro Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. In 1976, filmmaker Steve Brand began filming writer and activist Yossi Klein (known, since he moved to…
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Art For decades, a Jewish family has sought the return of their beloved painting — can the Supreme Court make that happen?
Twenty-two years ago, photographer Claude Cassirer received a call he never expected. His family’s long-lost Nazi-looted painting by the French-Jewish painter Camille Pissarro had been found. It was hanging in a Spanish museum. The painting, “Rue Saint-Honoré, Apres Midi, Effet de Pluie” depicts the grand avenues of modern Paris glistening during an afternoon rain. It…
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