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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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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In ‘Curb,’ not even Alexander Vindman is safe from Larry David’s warped worldview
After 11 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David, the master of his own moral universe, finally found a worthy foil in America’s other most upstanding Jew. On the show’s season finale, which aired Sunday, David met Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the man who blew the whistle on President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr…
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What we look at when we look at Joan Didion
It’s the first thing I think about when I think about Joan Didion: not the extraordinary grace of her storytelling or her magical sense of language — those come right after — but a portrait of her, taken in 1996 by the great Jewish photographer Irving Penn. Joan Didion by Irving Penn pic.twitter.com/KvqkIdLSHa — Daniel_F_Brami…
The Latest
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How the son of an Auschwitz survivor made it (really) big on Broadway
This season, the hottest director on Broadway is a 75-year-old son of Holocaust survivors. Fresh off “Mrs. Doubtfire,” the musical adaptation of the Robin Williams vehicle, Jerry Zaks is putting the finishing touches on “The Music Man,” which opens in February starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. “Yeah, it’s unbelievable,” said Zaks remarking on his…
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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…
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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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Culture I ranked the NYC mayoral candidates exclusively based on their bagel orders
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News How Jewish can you be in a Boca country club? Wrapping tefillin got a family suspended, lawsuit says
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Opinion Mike Huckabee’s stunning, terrifying new gift to the Israeli right
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Opinion Greta Thunberg’s Gaza flotilla was never going to help Palestinians
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