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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What programs like “Finding Your Roots” miss — and how I tracked down my own family’s history
Downtime from COVID, with no real end in sight, has led to all manner of new hobbies — and obsessions — including digging deeper into one’s family history. This had been a passion of mine even prior to the rising interest in ancestry that now is practically its own pandemic among my baby boomer peers….
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The Anne Frank play that was too dark, honest and Jewish for Broadway
In 1955, a decade after Anne Frank perished at Bergen-Belsen, “The Diary of Anne Frank” opened on Broadway. It won the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play. It would be produced all over the world, and adapted into a movie that was nominated for eight…
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Like a young Trump in training, the Tinder Swindler is manipulating the media for political gain
The Netflix documentary tells us more than you'd think about journalism and politics
The Latest
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‘Sex with Hitler’ is a video game that, unfortunately, does exactly what it promises
Kink comes in all shapes and forms. But I still doubt that what you were hoping to do with your time was play a game featuring a very buff and oddly shiny Hitler as your sexual avatar. And yet. Unfortunately, “Sex with Hitler” dropped in late January on the gaming platform Steam, and is doing…
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Books Hear classic Yiddish writers read their works, accompanied by translations
An audio recording of 12 Yiddish writers reading their works, accompanied by English translations, is now available. The recording can be ordered either as a digital download or as two CDs (or both), and comes with a book that includes the readings in Yiddish and in English, as well as a biography of each writer…
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The best (and worst) Jewish ads of the 2022 Super Bowl
While football diehards gnawed their nails as the Rams managed a last-minute victory over the Bengals, those once-a-year watchers had a quite different, but equally suspenseful, experience of Super Bowl LVI. Tuning in for the commercials, casual sports fans wondered which of the night’s two top products was being advertised in each spot: Electric vehicles…
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It was the most successful Jewish ad campaign of all time — but who was the model?
You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread ads. Duane Blue Spruce of the Laguna and Ohkay-Owingeh Pueblo tribes keeps a copy of a Levy’s ad pinned to his office wall at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan, where he works as a facilities planning coordinator. Blue…
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Books Her Bronx Jewish characters ‘hate history’ — and are finally back on bookshelves
Around two years ago, Johanna Kaplan learned, out of the blue, that HarperCollins was interested in reissuing a short story collection she had originally published all the way back in 1975. “It’s a marvelous, marvelous, amazing thing to be happening to me at this age,” said Kaplan, 79. When the collection debuted, under the title…
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Israeli goldfish can drive cars — but they’re not quite ready for the carpool lane
In Israeli author Etgar Keret’s short story collection “Fly Already,” a goldfish exits his bowl, puts on a pair of slippers and tunes into CNN. Of course it’s fanciful, but in real-life Israel, goldfish are already learning to drive – sort of. A team of researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have trained fish…
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Jason Brown may have been sixth in the Olympics but he’s first in my heart
I’ve never competed in figure skating; at this point, I can probably barely stand up on a pair of skates. But my mother — who also cannot skate — is such an avid consumer of figure skating that I grew up watching every competition, and as a result, I can name the jumps, the spins,…
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Woody Allen’s latest is playing in a New York theater — but is anybody going to see it? Anybody?
On Tuesday I opted to spend a gorgeous afternoon in New York City going to a movie. The movie was “Rifkin’s Festival,” Woody Allen’s latest and a film that presently has a 42% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 50% audience score. Given this tepid reception, I wondered who was going to see Allen’s film, which…
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