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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Never have I ever missed Stephen Sondheim more than I do today
The night that Stephen Sondheim died, I went out for drinks with a new friend. We played “Never Have I Ever,” a game I hadn’t even thought of since college, and I very slowly nursed a cocktail called, romantically, the Hundred-Year-Old Dream. We stayed out for hours. Sondheim was a master of human connection. He…
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How an Orthodox Jew became the great defender of books and bookstores
In Praise of Good Bookstores By Jeff Deutsch Princeton University Press, 216 pp, $19.95 My university’s library recently announced that, in order to make space for lounges and meeting rooms, it was putting about a third of its collection into storage. But not to worry: Readers need only submit a request, and a book will…
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A Yiddish performance so versatile, it spans from ‘Mauthausen’ to Elvis Presley
With her latest project, “The Ballad of Mauthausen,” Dutch Yiddish singer Niki Jacobs has pulled off the seemingly impossible: She has recast the song cycle of the same name by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis and poet Iakovos Kambanellis as an avant-garde Yiddish cantata that remains true to the spirit of the original while extracting new…
The Latest
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‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ undercuts its own feminist and Jewish identity
“Do what I say and not what I do,” seems to be the catchphrase for the newest season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” The fourth season sees comedy prodigy Miriam “Midge” Maisel rejecting the rules of a man’s world and attempting to have it all — her Upper West Side lifestyle, her job and her…
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Film & TV ‘WeCrashed’ is a live action cartoon of an Israeli CEO’s fall from grace
In the world of startups, WeWork’s Adam Neumann was a unicorn – the figurehead of a mythic, privately held company worth north of a billion dollars. In the world of Jews he was something just as legendary: 6’5”. Jared Leto – who plays Neumann in the new AppleTV+ show “WeCrashed,” the latest in a litany…
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Are virtual minyans and avatar rabbis the future of Judaism?
Some Reform and Orthodox Jews are finding a place to practice their religion in the Metaverse. Could a virtual Passover celebration be far off?
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Why we must keep talking about the horrors of Toulouse — even if we still can’t comprehend them
“Ten years have passed.” With these four words, French president Emmanuel Macron began a speech yesterday in the southern city of Toulouse. Using a biblical cadence, over the course of his speech, Macron repeated these four words, which formed a leitmotif, one that announced both a matter of fact and a fact that will always…
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‘The shame stayed with me.’ How a bullying incident from 1965 became an Oscar nominee.
Sadly, it could have been any day in fifth grade. A kid got the whole class in trouble, so the whole class retaliated, piling onto him outside of the school. Some spat, some hit – taking turns until the principal and teacher broke it up. Jay Rosenblatt had largely forgotten the specifics of why he…
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In Venice, why the oldest Jewish ghetto in the world still matters
A new book on the Venetian Ghetto, formed by the municipal government of Venice in the early 1500s to confine Italian Jews, explores the ongoing cultural impact of this first-ever such space. Initially intended to segregate and control Jewish people, centuries later during the Second World War, over 1,000 Nazi ghettos were established across Europe…
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Bono and Nancy Pelosi just compared Zelenskyy and St. Patrick. Should we be upset?
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish; this is hard to miss, at least within the Jewish media circles in which I run. Perhaps it is less widely known by non-Jews, but given the fact that one of the central refutations of Putin’s accusation of Nazism in Ukraine is that Zelenskyy is Jewish, something that has…
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In Ukraine, much of the world’s matzah supply is under fire
Before the Holocaust, Dnipro, a city in eastern Ukraine on the Dnieper River, had a rich Jewish history, home to tens of thousands of Jews. But, during Nazi occupation, the population plummeted from 80,000 to about 700, with at least 20,000 Jews murdered by firing squads while others fled or were deported. Today, Dnipro is…
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