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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The secret Jewish history of Teddy Roosevelt
Roosevelt was the first president to appoint a Jew to a Cabinet position
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In Season 4, Mrs. Maisel tries to have it all
Miriam “Midge” Maisel has never played by the rules. But she’s back, finally, for Season 4 of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and this time, she’s actively trying to break them all. Midge has been kicked off of the tour that was supposed to make her career and suddenly can’t get a gig anywhere, she’s taken…
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In painting a survivor of the Holocaust, a feeling of overwhelming and indescribable privilege
“Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust,” an exhibition of paintings commissioned by Charles, Prince of Wales was previously shown in Buckingham Palace and soon may be visited at The Palace of Holyroodhouse, the official residence of the British monarch in Scotland, until June 6, 2022. In the catalogue, portraits of Holocaust survivors now living in the…
The Latest
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Ceramics, Broadway, gay rights activism, Tevye, memoirs — for Harvey Fierstein, they’re all parts of the same quilt
“Hello, Merv,” the unmistakably familiar voice says, gravelly yet warm. “What can I tell you, cookie?” The first thing I want to ask Harvey Fierstein, the 67-year-old multiple Tony Award-winning actor, playwright and librettist, is why he decided to write a memoir. “COVID hit,” he says. “Which I’m sure is the reason for most people…
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Before the revolution, a little peace and quiet — now there’s a radical idea
The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas By Gal Beckerman Crown, 331 pages, $28.99 Have social media — especially mega sites such as Facebook and Twitter — played indispensable roles in social change in recent years? Your guess, and mine, would likely be yes. Not so fast, says Gal Beckerman in his…
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What programs like “Finding Your Roots” miss — and how I tracked down my own family’s history
Downtime from COVID, with no real end in sight, has led to all manner of new hobbies — and obsessions — including digging deeper into one’s family history. This had been a passion of mine even prior to the rising interest in ancestry that now is practically its own pandemic among my baby boomer peers….
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The Anne Frank play that was too dark, honest and Jewish for Broadway
In 1955, a decade after Anne Frank perished at Bergen-Belsen, “The Diary of Anne Frank” opened on Broadway. It won the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play. It would be produced all over the world, and adapted into a movie that was nominated for eight…
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Like a young Trump in training, the Tinder Swindler is manipulating the media for political gain
The Netflix documentary tells us more than you'd think about journalism and politics
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‘Sex with Hitler’ is a video game that, unfortunately, does exactly what it promises
Kink comes in all shapes and forms. But I still doubt that what you were hoping to do with your time was play a game featuring a very buff and oddly shiny Hitler as your sexual avatar. And yet. Unfortunately, “Sex with Hitler” dropped in late January on the gaming platform Steam, and is doing…
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Books Hear classic Yiddish writers read their works, accompanied by translations
An audio recording of 12 Yiddish writers reading their works, accompanied by English translations, is now available. The recording can be ordered either as a digital download or as two CDs (or both), and comes with a book that includes the readings in Yiddish and in English, as well as a biography of each writer…
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The best (and worst) Jewish ads of the 2022 Super Bowl
While football diehards gnawed their nails as the Rams managed a last-minute victory over the Bengals, those once-a-year watchers had a quite different, but equally suspenseful, experience of Super Bowl LVI. Tuning in for the commercials, casual sports fans wondered which of the night’s two top products was being advertised in each spot: Electric vehicles…
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
In Case You Missed It
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Looking Forward My artist grandmother nearly made aliyah. I don’t know what she’d think of Israel today
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.