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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Six ways to celebrate the choreography in the new ‘West Side Story’
In many musicals, the dance is the icing on the cake — a sweet, sometimes saccharine flourish on top of an already constructed treat. But the “West Side Story” recipe is different. In the 1957 musical conceived, directed, and co-choreographed by Jerome Robbins, and the 1961 film adaptation, also choreographed and directed (in part) by…
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How Jewish is Hallmark’s ‘Eight Gifts of Hanukkah’?
I have a confession to make: I just enjoyed a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie. Or, all right; I’ll qualify that: It was “Eight Gifts of Hanukkah” — the one outlier in Hallmark’s “Countdown to Christmas” series (re-airing Dec. 12, 10 a.m. Eastern). And one reason I liked it is I view the channel in a…
The Latest
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No cream cheese? No problem. A dozen alternate bagel toppings.
We’re sure you’ve heard by now. First it was toilet paper. Then coins. At last, the supply chain’s woes have hit us squarely in the Jewish soul: there’s a cream cheese shortage in New York. While various reports have it that some bagel places are still schmearing enough Philadelphia to top a sugar cone, many…
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The prickly reason Mel Gibson will never be canceled
The reason Mel Gibson still works in Hollywood has to do with some obscure — possibly Australian — practice called cactus-hugging. Earlier this week actor Josh Malina, writing for The Atlantic, wondered why Gibson, despite his many high-profile — and in the case of “Passion of the Christ,” highly lucrative — displays of antisemitism, may…
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Kwanzakkah celebrates power of dual identities, overcoming oppressions
For Carol Valoris, the holiday season used to evoke mixed feelings. As a white Jewish mother of two Black Jewish daughters, she described seeing her family zigzagging between Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. No matter which holiday the family was observing, she said, someone was always left out. “It always felt a little bittersweet,” said Valoris, 75,…
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Why did Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen make a Christmas show — and why is it so bad?
What if Santa was a Jewish woman? That’s a question no one ever asked until “Santa, Inc.,” a new stop-animation show on HBOMax starring Seth Rogen as Santa and Sarah Silverman as an elf named Candy Smalls. Of course, no one really needed to ask that question. And even “Santa Inc.” barely addresses it —…
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Why I made a siddur for cigarettes and what it does (and doesn’t) mean
Before you is a cigarette box designed to look like a small prayer book. The idea for this object had been rattling around in my head since 2015. Realizing that I did not have the technical skills to make it myself, I contacted Rachel Jackson, a scribe and bookbinder, and during the summer of 2017…
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Peru’s most celebrated author was a great friend to the Jews — is he still?
The Peruvian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, recently honored by election to the French Academy, has long expressed his creative debt to Jewish writers and thinkers. More recently, some readers have asked whether Varguitas (a nickname he adopted for his fiction, reused in a memoir by an ex-wife) is a friend to be cherished…
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A baseball star and all-around mensch finally makes it to the Hall of Fame
The news that Gil Hodges, former Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman and New York Mets manager, has been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, should make the Jews already present in that hallowed spot kvell. Including the late Marvin Miller, the longtime player’s union executive who was belatedly inducted into…
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That time Tom Waits taught Bob Dylan how to curse in Yiddish
Tom Waits, whose colorful career in music and entertainment began around 1970, turns 72 today Dec. 7. While he may not be as prolific as he once was as a recording artist, Waits continues to perform and record, and he still shows up in feature films like “Licorice Pizza,” the new Paul Thomas Anderson film…
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It won the Israeli Oscar. But one of its subjects calls it a ‘pseudo-documentary.’
The man who provided the source material for an Ophir-award winning documentary about Nazi architect Albert Speer is challenging the film’s accuracy, claiming the filmmakers put words in his — and Speer’s — mouth. Screenwriter Andrew Birkin, who tape-recorded over 40 hours of conversation with Speer while developing a film adaptation of Speer’s memoir “Inside…
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