Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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I have seen the future of America — in a pastrami sandwich in Queens
San Wei, which serves pastrami sandwiches along with churros and biang biang noodles, represents an immigrant's fulfillment of the American dream
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Hitler wanted his 1936 Olympics to wow the world. The Forward highlighted protest games instead.
The modern Olympic games, first held in Athens in the summer of 1896, predate the Forward’s founding by less than one year. In the 52 winter and summer games to take place since, the Jewish stories have ranged from tales of perseverance and success, as in the victories of Jewish athletes like Mark Spitz and…
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How a Yiddish theater mecca became ‘the church of rock ‘n’ roll’
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the closing of the Fillmore East, the iconic theater that early on was dubbed by a member of the Grateful Dead as “The Church of Rock n Roll.” And while the Fillmore is best known for the way it mainstreamed youth music, this rock ‘n’ roll church also has…
The Latest
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We’ll always have Paris (even if Paris can never be the same)
The pandemic had me fearing I might die without getting to use my miles. Soon after it was announced that France was reopening, our son, whose wife grew up there, said, “We’re taking the baby to Paris. Want to come?” Since I’m a Jewish mother and now the grandmother of an adorable 20-month-old, he had…
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From Israel, an anguished cry of rage, pain and love
Two years after he won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival with his existential and diasporic parable “Synonyms,” Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid traded the marshes of Prussia for the beaches of Southern France, where his latest film, “Ahed’s Knee” picked up the Prix de la Jury at the 74th Cannes Film Festival. Lapid,…
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In Lakewood, New Jersey, a garden blooms — and so does a community
Wearing a broadbrimmed straw garden hat, Tova Herskovitz looked over the raised beds and smiled. The first carrot tops were poking through the chocolate-colored soil, the purple kale was already looking hearty, and so was the mint. “Everybody should take some mint home with them,” she said. As a longtime organizer, Herskovitz loves it when…
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With #MyOrthodoxLife, religious women say Netflix doesn’t speak for them
It looked like a pretty ordinary Instagram post: a smiling woman in a trendy periwinkle dress, posed against a background of roses. But Alex Fleksher, the woman in the picture, was on a mission. She wanted people to know that plenty of women “are leading happy, healthy, and fulfilled Orthodox lives,” she wrote. “I’m a…
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Ben & Jerry’s is leaving Israeli settlements and people online are taking it very seriously
Ben & Jerry’s has historically been a very vocal advocate of social justice and environmental issues. At the top of the company’s Twitter page, a thread condemning the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is pinned. On 4/20, instead of making jokes about stoners eating ice cream, the company bought billboards to criticize racial bias…
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WATCH NOW: December 14: An Evening With Writer-Director Nicholas Meyer
Watch now. The legendary Oscar-nominated mastermind of “The Seven-Percent Solution,” “Time After Time,” and three classic “Star Trek” films joins Forward executive editor Adam Langer for a discussion of his illustrious career, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and his latest novel, “The Return of the Pharaoh,” which follows Sherlock Holmes on a death-defying…
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Bob Dylan’s overblown new music video offers only a ‘Shadow’ of transcendence
I confess that I was in a pretty bad mood yesterday when it was time to log in to view “Shadow Kingdom,” a global, online pay-per-view event starring Bob Dylan. I had spent a large part of the day reading deeply into the news — about the upswing in COVID, catastrophic and deadly natural events…
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Jews have survived a lot — and this artist is preparing us for the apocalypse
The last 16 months have felt like an apocalypse movie at many points — a global pandemic, the attack on the Capitol, a massive drought and widespread forest fires in the Western U.S., even those murder hornets that briefly made headlines. Yet to artist and architect Daniel Toretsky, the catastrophes felt familiar; Jews have faced…
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How a Jewish spy infiltrated the U.S. atomic program — and helped the Soviet Union build the bomb
Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away By Ann Hagedorn Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $28 Was the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s nothing but political hysteria? For all its deleterious effects on free speech rights, reputations, and careers, it seems not. Cold War fears of the domestic threat…
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Most Popular
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Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
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Culture Trump wants to honor Hannah Arendt in a ‘Garden of American Heroes.’ Is this a joke?
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Fast Forward The invitation said, ‘No Jews.’ The response from campus officials, at least, was real.
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Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward As Supreme Court considers religious charter schools, Justice Kagan speculates about publicly funded yeshivas
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Fast Forward A Jewish city attorney is going after pro-Palestinian protesters. Her Oct. 7 tweets are making it complicated.
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Fast Forward Kehlani responds to Cornell concert cancellation: ‘I am not antisemitic’
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Fast Forward David Horowitz, ’60s radical turned right-wing firebrand and critic of Islam, dies at 86
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