This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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Moon Knight’s Star of David necklace was easy to miss. It was also a watershed moment for Marvel.
Amid a blur of hieroglyphs, ankhs and sarcophagi, it was easy to miss a more subtle symbol glinting from Oscar Isaac’s neck in last week’s installment of “Moon Knight.” Unless you happen to be Jewish and watching for signs of Jewish life. In the final minutes of the episode, Isaac’s Marc Spector wakes up in…
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Can an all-Mormon cast pull off ‘Fiddler on the Roof’? We traveled to Utah to find out.
There’s a growing trend of Christians interested in Judaism, searching for connection
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Cartoonist Liana Finck on rewriting Genesis, God as a woman and why Abraham feels like a Philip Roth character
In Liana Finck’s Book of Genesis, Lilith is the Serpent, Joseph wears a merman tail and God is a woman. The New Yorker cartoonist’s latest graphic novel, “Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation,” envisages the Almighty as a work in progress. She is lonely, so She creates people. In a moment…
The Latest
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How Jewish is Moon Knight anyway? Depends whether you’re reading it or watching it on Disney.
Marvel’s newest superhero offering, the six-part “Moon Knight” miniseries on Disney+, stars Oscar Isaac, a big-name actor, as the fairly obscure comics character. On the face of it, it’s an opportunity for Isaac to define the role, like Wesley Snipes did with Blade and Robert Downey Jr. with Iron Man. But Moon Knight, as deep…
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She typed up Schindler’s list — and, in so doing, showed how a secretary could become a hero
Mimi Reinhardt, who died April 8 at age 107, proved that administrative assistants can be powerful forces for good or evil, depending on their own personal qualities. As Austrian Jewish secretary to the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, she typed clean copies of the celebrated list of around 1200 Jews who were claimed as essential workers…
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At the Lower East Side Passover Parade, immigrants created new American identities
“While the Easter Parade on Sunday was a complete failure owing to the inclement weather, the Passover Parade on Saturday was a huge success.” So, in April, 1906, declared The Hebrew Standard, a New York Jewish periodical. The paper went on to describe the scene on Grand Street, home of the Parade, writing that it…
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Why it matters whether we describe Putin’s appalling crimes against humanity ‘genocide’
The horrors produced by Russian soldiers in Bucha and Borodyanka have spurred countless commentaries on two concepts: crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide. Commentators rightly note that these notions differ not on the heinous nature of certain acts, but on how they should be defined. But often missing from these discussions is the…
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How Amy Schumer’s new show makes Judaism look bad
What does it mean to be a Jewish TV show? Sometimes the answer is obvious. Shows like “Shtisel” and “Unorthodox” are set in deeply Jewish communities; “Valley of Tears” and “Our Boys” take on major events from Jewish history. Then there are shows like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which seems to scream “THIS IS A…
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On her first Netflix special, a Jewish comedian’s breathless display of timing, charisma and self-regard
At the end of the new Catherine Cohen Netflix special I was so breathless I wasn’t quite sure what I’d seen. It’s not that Cohen isn’t funny — she is — but the experience of an hour of “The Twist? She’s Gorgeous” is both exhilarating and exhausting. As Cohen might say, with a flick of…
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Playing Yentl’s father, Billy Wilder’s gangster and Papa Mousekewitz, he was a Jewish actor of unparalleled resourcefulness
When Barbra Streisand sang the Oscar-nominated song “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” in her film “Yentl,” she was singing it to Nehemiah Persoff’s character, Rebbe Mendel. Persoff, who died April 5 at age 102, also starred as Papa Mousekewitz in the “American Tail” movie series. Yet Persoff’s varied work on stage, film, and TV proved…
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How one trailblazing rabbi is fighting racism in the Reconstructionist movement
Like other Jewish institutions, the Reconstructionist movement made a commitment to racial justice in 2020 as part of its stated mission to blend a strong commitment to Jewish tradition with the search for contemporary meaning. Unlike some others, its leaders vowed to make it more than just lip service. That year, their Tikkun Olam Commission…
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Yiddish אַ פֿײַערונג לכּבֿוד ייִדיש־ליגעס „ווערטער פֿון דער וואָך“ A celebration of the League for Yiddish series ‘Words of the Week’
גיטל שעכטער־ווישוואַנאַט, וואָס פֿירט אָן מיט דער סעריע, וועט רעדן וועגן דעם אָפּרוף פֿון אָן אַ שיעור לייענער.
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