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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In the post-Anthony Weiner and Harvey Weinstein era, a battle against sexual, moral and viral contagions
Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis By Laura Kipnis Pantheon, 210 pages, $26 Enmeshed in a seemingly endless pandemic, we’ve all become amateur epidemiologists, as Laura Kipnis notes, even if we’re not all equally adept at it. In Kipnis’s latest book, she harnesses her caustic prose and scathing wit to another amateur pursuit:…
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Are you ready for season four of ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel?’
Midge Maisel has come a long way since we first met her in a basement comedy club in Greenwich Village, her picture-perfect marriage and picture-perfect life falling apart in real time. Now she’s gone on tour, done shows in Las Vegas and…her life is still falling apart. But in a new way! The fourth season…
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Why Jimmy Cagney spoke better Yiddish than just about any other actor in Hollywood
Of all movie scenes in Yiddish, one of the most popular — that of an increasingly agitated man who vainly attempts to make a clueless Irish cop understand his desire to reach Ellis Island — is not from a Yiddish film, but from “Taxi!” a 1932 film starring Jimmy Cagney. The previous year, Cagney had…
The Latest
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She’s found a new way to keep Holocaust stories alive — one step at a time
There’s a moment in Elie Wiesel’s “Night” that seared itself into Rachel Linsky’s consciousness in the spring of 2020. Wiesel and his family have just arrived at Auschwitz. Twice, Wiesel and his father move to the left, first away from his mother and sisters and then toward an unknown fate: either the crematoria or the…
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When Harpo spoke — to save a relative from World War II Europe
In March of 1941, a 72-year-old German Jewish widow named Helene Schickler was waiting to join her family in the U.S. She was then living in a convent in Naples with other refugees, and the nuns hosting them were running out of food. She was losing weight, strength and hope. A doctor came to examine…
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‘Hatzaad Harishon’ broke barriers – until race, identity questions proved too much
This article is an edited excerpt from from Janice W. Fernheimer’s book, “Stepping Into Zion: Hatzaad Harishon, Black Jews, and the Remaking of Jewish Identity,” (University of Alabama Press 2014). For the first years of its short existence, Hatzaad Harishon successfully created opportunities for Blacks who identified as Jews but who may not have been…
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Could Israelites be brought into mainstream Judaism? 50 years ago, one effort did just that
Can mainstream, largely white, Jewish organizations and individual Jews reach out to Black Israelite groups? And should they, even if many view the historically Black congregations as not “real Jews”? And if they’re not real Jews, is it time to bring them into the fold? Before attempting to answer those questions, know that an effort…
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On Netflix, a notorious Israeli swindler finally gets his comeuppance
Watching Netflix’s “The Tinder Swindler,” about an accomplished Israeli conman and the victims who exposed him, I couldn’t stop thinking of TikTok’s most-maligned and unremarkable f-boy, West Elm Caleb. On paper, the titular swindler, a felon named Shimon Hayut, and W.E.C, a tall, mustachioed New York furniture designer who is bad at online dating, seem…
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A lifelong lover of provocation, she survived Auschwitz and sought to make the Holocaust visible
Charlotte Delbo was a non-Jewish French writer who was active in the anti-Nazi Resistance movement during World War II, which led to her being imprisoned in Auschwitz extermination camp. Her books and plays about surviving that experience, including “Auschwitz and After”; “Convoy to Auschwitz”; and “None of Us Will Return” have won admiring readers. A…
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She died of cystic fibrosis. A new film tells her story — in her own words
After Mallory Smith died in 2017, her mom finally got a chance to look at her diary. Smith had just turned 25 when she died from complications of cystic fibrosis. For 10 years she’d documented her life and thoughts on her computer and devices. When she gave her mother, Diane Shader Smith, the password, there…
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At the Olympic hockey games, a bounty of Jewish players
Looking over the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey rosters, one certainly sees some familiar hockey names — Ferraro, McTavish, Staal, Winnik and Desharnais, for example — but what must be a hockey first is that Team Canada will ice three players with ties to the Jewish faith: Josh Ho-Sang, Jason Demers and Devon Levi. Levi’s affiliation…
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