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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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Does ‘A Christmas Carol’ have an antisemitic message or a Jewish humanist one?
The name Ebenezer is Hebrew, deriving from the phrase eben ha-ezer, meaning “stone of the help”
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The Holocaust robbed them of their stories; this artist is bringing them back to life
In his new graphic nonfiction narrative book “When I Grow Up, the Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers,” author and New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein deftly gives life to the never-told stories of six Jewish teenagers in the lost world of Yiddishuania, formerly Poland/Lithuania. In the 1930s, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, then based…
The Latest
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What ever became of the Hasid from Japan — a quintessentially New York Jewish story
In my work as a reporter in the New York Bureau of a Japanese newspaper, I used to periodically interview Henry Kissinger. Every couple of years, for nearly two decades, I’d accompany a colleague from Japan and pay a visit to Kissinger Associates on Park Avenue. In much of East Asia, Kissinger is still viewed…
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Pee-wee Herman, a Hallmark Hanukkah and more movies to watch this Christmas
This year for sure, we all fervently hoped we would be able to return to the dim, dank and sticky sanctuary of our local multiplex and engage in that most hallowed Jewish custom: A movie on Christmas. Man plans, Hashem laughs. With a new, super-transmissible variant of the coronavirus rampaging through the world, many still…
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Why Bob Einstein — aka Marty Funkhouser from ‘Curb,’ aka Super Dave, aka Officer Judy — contained multitudes
Bob Einstein was a comedic test case in nature versus nurture. In the end, comedy was what came naturally. The son of vaudevillian Parkyakarkus (né Harry Einstein), who was a crackup on the radio and around the dinner table, Einstein had a showbiz pedigree. And yet, he rejected the call of entertainment until he was…
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You can now buy the bible in NFT form. But why would you want to?
Perhaps you’re deep into cryptocurrency and blockchain technology and know exactly what a non-fungible token is. Or maybe you, like me, barely know what any of those words mean, but have a vague sense that dudes in a certain kind of bar love to talk your ear off about bitcoin and that NFTs are some…
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In Paul Rudd’s extreme disappointment, a universal philosophy for 2022
The most recent episode of “Saturday Night Live” revealed that Paul Rudd is not just the sexiest man alive in America in 2021, but also the savviest. Rudd was to be inducted into the “5-Timers Club” — those happy few who have hosted “SNL” five times. But with the Omicron variant sweeping across New York…
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Does the cheesecake shortage of 2021 mean that Christmas is becoming more Jewish?
Promptly at noon Friday, I went to a Philadelphia cream cheese website to sign up for the “Spread The Feel” campaign. Amid an ongoing cream cheese shortage, Philadelphia’s parent company Kraft Heinz is paying customers $20 to not make cheesecake for Christmas. In exchange for an email address and basic personal info, Kraft will reimburse…
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In a Jewish Nobel laureate’s new collection, recipes for surviving a cold, hard winter
Winter Recipes from the Collective By Louise Glück Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 64pp, $25 The new book of poetry from Louise Glück — her first since she won the Nobel in 2020 — provides a steady unfolding of meaning, quite out of proportion to its brevity. Comprising 15 poems spread out over 40 pages, the…
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Surviving the Holocaust was a miracle, but the nightmares persist
The memories of Holocaust survivors never cease to horrify. Whenever you think you’re shock-proof, you have to think again. In John Rokosny’s PBS documentary, “They Survived Together,” one survivor recounts how the Nazis, having invaded Poland, forced Jews to carve out their own graves and lie down in them. Often, the self-created graves contained families,…
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What Yiddish (and the Forward) are doing in the new ‘Spider-Man’
Everytime Spider-Man flirts with the fickle multiverse he encounters a couple of constants. The first is that a version of Spider-Man exists in every reality. The second is that Jews do too. Even, it would seem, the Jews who write for this very Jewish paper. In “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Jews are everywhere. As David…
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