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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Gilbert Gottfried, an iconic and inimitable comedic voice, dies at 67
Gilbert Gottfried, the onetime voice of the Aflac duck, the “Aladdin” parrot Iago and the filthiest roaster on any dais, has died at the age of 67. On the comedian’s Twitter page, Gottfried’s family announced that he had passed after a long illness. pic.twitter.com/STHhfpVSKU — Gilbert Gottfried (@RealGilbert) April 12, 2022 Known for his adenoidal…
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Is Neil Simon still funny? (Hint: This may be a trick question.)
Feeling cheerfully kvetchy about Neil Simon is a very Neil Simon way to feel
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Can four stylish yeshiva lads find love and karmic bliss amid the temptations of ‘New Hebron?’
At the start of the second season of the Israeli hit comedy, “Shababnikim,” or “The New Black,” as it’s called in English, our four favorite TV yeshiva bochers — Avinoam, Gedalia, Dov Lazer, and Meir — have landed in the neighborhood of Rehavia, on what residents call the last secular street in Jerusalem. Kicked out…
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‘Tokyo Vice’ is a portrait of the reporter as a terrible coworker
It’s Jake Adelstein’s first week as a reporter at The Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Tokyo’s biggest newspapers, and the protagonist of “Tokyo Vice,” a new crime miniseries from HBO, is already questioning how things are done. Jake (Ansel Elgort) is covering a stabbing, and he writes that the victim was murdered — as he certainly…
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Moon Knight’s Star of David necklace was easy to miss. It was also a watershed moment for Marvel.
Amid a blur of hieroglyphs, ankhs and sarcophagi, it was easy to miss a more subtle symbol glinting from Oscar Isaac’s neck in last week’s installment of “Moon Knight.” Unless you happen to be Jewish and watching for signs of Jewish life. In the final minutes of the episode, Isaac’s Marc Spector wakes up in…
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Can an all-Mormon cast pull off ‘Fiddler on the Roof’? We traveled to Utah to find out.
There’s a growing trend of Christians interested in Judaism, searching for connection
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Cartoonist Liana Finck on rewriting Genesis, God as a woman and why Abraham feels like a Philip Roth character
In Liana Finck’s Book of Genesis, Lilith is the Serpent, Joseph wears a merman tail and God is a woman. The New Yorker cartoonist’s latest graphic novel, “Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation,” envisages the Almighty as a work in progress. She is lonely, so She creates people. In a moment…
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How Jewish is Moon Knight anyway? Depends whether you’re reading it or watching it on Disney.
Marvel’s newest superhero offering, the six-part “Moon Knight” miniseries on Disney+, stars Oscar Isaac, a big-name actor, as the fairly obscure comics character. On the face of it, it’s an opportunity for Isaac to define the role, like Wesley Snipes did with Blade and Robert Downey Jr. with Iron Man. But Moon Knight, as deep…
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She typed up Schindler’s list — and, in so doing, showed how a secretary could become a hero
Mimi Reinhardt, who died April 8 at age 107, proved that administrative assistants can be powerful forces for good or evil, depending on their own personal qualities. As Austrian Jewish secretary to the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, she typed clean copies of the celebrated list of around 1200 Jews who were claimed as essential workers…
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At the Lower East Side Passover Parade, immigrants created new American identities
“While the Easter Parade on Sunday was a complete failure owing to the inclement weather, the Passover Parade on Saturday was a huge success.” So, in April, 1906, declared The Hebrew Standard, a New York Jewish periodical. The paper went on to describe the scene on Grand Street, home of the Parade, writing that it…
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Why it matters whether we describe Putin’s appalling crimes against humanity ‘genocide’
The horrors produced by Russian soldiers in Bucha and Borodyanka have spurred countless commentaries on two concepts: crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide. Commentators rightly note that these notions differ not on the heinous nature of certain acts, but on how they should be defined. But often missing from these discussions is the…
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