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 a legendary New Wave band got a new jolt of Jewish humor
We’re entering spring and lo and behold — wonders of wonders! — Devo once again walks among us. The band, which gestated in Akron, Ohio, as an agitprop art/music project during the early 1970s and came to fame a decade later during the punk/new wave era, is back, doing four shows in May. That’s one…
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Does Goliath deserve his bad reputation? A new spin on an old villain
Does Goliath, the giant notorious for his biblical confrontation with David, deserve sympathy? The latest book by Jonathan Friedmann, professor of Jewish music history at the Academy for Jewish Religion California, explains why he may be getting some. “Goliath as Gentle Giant” examines the recent phenomenon of humanizing depictions in popular culture of David’s opponent….
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April 25: 1-on-1 with Julia Haart of My Unorthodox Life
This conversation will take place on Tuesday, April 25 at 7 p.m. ET./ 4 p.m. PT. Julia Haart is a self-made business woman, designer and author. She was raised in an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. At age 42 she fled, changed her name and without any formal education or background in fashion launched her career as…
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A stunning documentary recalls the many times Babyn Yar was forgotten
Sergei Loznitsa's "Babi Yar. Context," grapples with events many would rather not discuss
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What the 1950 census can tell us about Jewish life in America
Jewish genealogists and researchers are eagerly awaiting midnight April 1, when the U.S. 1950 decennial census will be made public by the National Archives and Records Administration. Seventy-two years to the day the enumeration began, the entries of the 151 million Americans tallied will be made accessible online. The data will give a snapshot of…
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For Israel, an extraordinary summit reveals a path to coexistence
While the world pays more attention to an actor slapping a comedian, something remarkable and long unimaginable is happening in Israel. Four Arab leaders are visiting, representing the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco and Bahrain, along with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. And the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates is sounding like…
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It was the strangest Oscars in recent memory. Was it also the least Jewish?
The slap heard round the world stole the thunder of an evening that ended with an iconic moment of silent applause. And yet, it is the Flash’s shattering of the sound barrier that stays with me. The 94th Academy Awards featured, for the first time, an audience-polled segment ranking iconic sequences in film. As picked…
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Like Albert Camus, Zelenskyy has learned to resist the plague of the absurd
When the novel coronavirus claimed the world’s attention in 2020, so too did a novel by Albert Camus. With the quickening of the pandemic, “The Plague” became an item almost as essential as toilet paper and facemasks on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, 1,700 copies of “La Peste” were sold in January 2020…
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The Jewish jazz master who Hunter S. Thompson thought could cure any ailment
I first met Herbie Mann in January 1979, when I noticed him bursting out of a phone booth in the parking lot of Tower Records in L.A. It wasn’t the noted jazz flutist in the flesh, of course, but rather the image of him on a six-foot-tall cover of his new album, “Super Mann,” which…
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Biden, Putin, Zelenskyy, Penn — and the true nature of obscenity
Let’s talk about what’s obscene. First, consider what President Joe Biden considers “obscene.” “Putin has the gall to say he is “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. This lie isn’t just cynical. It is obscene,” Biden declared in a speech in Warsaw, and later tweeted. How so, one might ask? “President Zelenskyy was democratically elected. He is Jewish —…
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How Madeleine Albright downplayed then came to embrace her Jewish heritage
Albright eventually came to terms with her Jewish past past, while remaining an observant Episcopalian
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News Jewish Democrats press for oversight as Trump’s Iran war rages on
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