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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How ‘Jaws’ started out as a movie and became a pop culture phenomenon
Editor’s Note: The director Steven Spielberg turns 75 on Dec. 18. To mark that momentous occasion, the Forward is running a series of essays reassessing his films. It’s the last weekend of August 1975, and my friends and I are excitedly flopping into our seats at the State Theater in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. We’ve…
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Was the movie that upended Steven Spielberg’s formula also his most autobiographical?
Editor’s Note: The director Steven Spielberg turns 75 on Dec. 18. To mark that momentous occasion, the Forward is running a series of essays reassessing his films. Read more of our “Spielberg at 75” series here. Audiences love Steven Spielberg for the same reason many cinephiles scorn him: his epic, unflagging earnestness. Critics and fellow…
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Did the Proud Boys just embrace an antisemitic, anti-white group?
Black Hammer, an organization perhaps best known for tweeting “Anne Frank is a colonizer,” has just joined forces with self-described “Western chauvinist” group the Proud Boys to “defeat the disgusting p*do-loving, welfare economy demoncrats [sic] and their puppet master, BIG PHARMA,” according to a tweet from Black Hammer. The tweet received over 2,000 quote tweets…
The Latest
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Could this devastatingly poignant film be Israel’s next Oscar winner?
Ohad Milstein’s “Summer Nights,” a rumored Oscar contender, is delicate, nuanced and complex even at its deceptively most simple moments. Though it is categorized as a documentary, the film is more of a cinematic mood poem, one that touches upon father-son relationships, the passage of time, aging, death and God. Much of it is told…
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How telling the heartbreaking story of a boy in wartime turned Steven Spielberg into a grown-up filmmaker
Editor’s Note: The director Steven Spielberg turns 75 on Dec. 18. To mark that momentous occasion, the Forward is running a series of essays reassessing his films. Read more of our “Spielberg at 75” series here. On the eve of Steven Spielberg’s 75th birthday, consensus holds that he is America’s most beloved director, its leading…
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In the cream cheese fiasco of 2021, a new suspect emerges — is it the water?
While Manhattan bagel shops are scrambling to meet their schmear demands, for Paul Denise, the Superintendent of Public Works in Lowville, New York, the cream cheese crisis of 2021 reflects a much larger concern: balancing competing water needs in his community. Lowville, a village of 3,200 people near the Canadian border, is home to one…
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The best Jewish (and Jew-ish) films of 2021
The cinematic year of 2021 felt like a time warp. Let’s put it this way. In March, the Grammys, a show known for its belated schedule, awarded Billie Eilish Best Song Written for Visual Media for the title track of the James Bond flick “No Time to Die,” a film that wouldn’t even be released…
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More than 60 years later, ‘West Side Story’ still matters — here’s why
Recently I went to a Seattle cineplex to see the new “West Side Story” film. But my dance with the show didn’t start there. It all began in 1959. I was an artsy nine-year old girl living in suburban Detroit, and one of my favorite things was my modern dance class. It met every Saturday…
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Last chance to see the Rolling Stones — a dispatch from the alte-kocker-rocker circuit
The cold orange dawn on Nov. 20 found me and my old poet friend Lee crammed into the back row of a plane from New York to Austin, Texas, bound for the Rolling Stones’ show that night. It would be the first time I’d ever seen them, 56 years after the fuzz-guitar riff of “Satisfaction”…
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How Jewish exiles from Vienna remade Hollywood in their image
When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened earlier this year, it faced criticism for neglecting the foundational role American Jewish immigrants played in the movie industry. Its recent symposium and screening series, “Vienna in Hollywood,” planned long in advance of the opening, helped set the record straight. It highlighted the contributions of the European…
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The original ‘West Side Story’ was Jewish — would it have been a better musical?
It starts in an alley. An angsty Italian gang creeps onstage in a “stylized prologue showing the restlessness of the youths.” It’s New York City in the 1950s, and, as the plot progresses, warring ethnic groups articulate their frustrations via song and dance. Children die preventable deaths; everyone sings; the audience thinks soberly about prejudice…
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