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 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…
The Latest
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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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Wait, Robinson Crusoe wasn’t Jewish — was he?
This month marks the 300th anniversary of the death of Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor who served as inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” a novel cherished by generations of readers. The tale of the shipwrecked mariner, first published in 1719, pleased a wide readership avid for adventure stories, like the Jews who relished travel…
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A mensch of an architect, full of whimsy, genius and morality
Richard Rogers, the English architect who died on Dec. 18 at age 88, proved that it can take a Jewish village to achieve architectural greatness. Cocreator of such popular buildings as the Pompidou Center in Paris, Rogers was born in prewar Florence. He was influenced by his father’s Italian Jewish family, especially a cousin, the…
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