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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Lucille Ball may have prevailed over censorship, but on Dick Van Dyke’s show, it was another story
While I was watching “Being the Ricardos,” Aaron Sorkin’s film that dramatizes Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s feud with CBS over showing the star of “I Love Lucy” pregnant, I was reminded of the stifling censorship that existed when I broke into television writing. Even 20 years after the events depicted in the movie had…
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I am begging you all to please shut up about the Harry Potter Jew-goblins
Jon Stewart has everyone talking about whether goblins in Harry Potter are a Jewish stereotype. Thinking they are antisemitic is... antisemitic
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A ‘vaguely Jewish’ director confronts a vexing Jewish dilemma in a specifically Jewish play
The stage director David Cromer once described himself as “vaguely Jewish.” His current job has erased the “vaguely.” “It forces me to spend more time thinking about what my Judaism means to me,” Cromer said. “What I owe to it, what it has provided for me. I think about it quite a bit.” That job…
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In new memoir, Jamie Raskin recalls chaos and confusion of Jan. 6 insurrection
Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, lost his son to suicide in the last days of 2020. Just a few days later, he lived through the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol — and became a central figure in the Democratic Party’s response. As the lead House of Representatives impeachment manager charged with prosecuting President…
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Was Humphrey Bogart playing a famous Jewish gangster in this overlooked movie?
Eighty years ago this month, Warner Brothers released “All Through the Night,” a comedy-drama about reformed gangster “Gloves” Donahue who, upon learning the German baker of his favorite cheesecake has been murdered, uncovers, attacks and breaks up a secret Nazi spy cell in New York’s Yorkville neighborhood with the help of his colorful Runyonesque criminal…
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Why it matters that the pope has his own Netflix show
Why would the pope -- who hasn't watched TV in over 20 years -- have a Netflix show?
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In cricket, instances of antisemitism amid a rich Jewish history
Is cricket, passionately played in England and its former colonies, undergoing an antisemitism crisis? So asked the English Jewish barrister Daniel Lightman in a recent article in the right-wing outlet The Spectator. The cricket world was jarred after Azeem Rafiq, a former player of Pakistani origin, admitted that, as a teenager, he had posted mocking…
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Genius, jerk, misogynist, everyman — the many lives of Saul Bellow
Asaf Galay’s documentary “The Adventures of Saul Bellow,” with its play on the title of Bellow’s breakthrough 1953 novel, “The Adventures of Augie March,” adroitly signals its intentions: not just to thumbnail the writer’s picaresque life and literary career, but to seek out correspondences between the two. With Bellow, who died at 89 in 2005,…
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No, she wasn’t Jewish, but Betty White had a very Jewish century
There was nothing Jewish about Betty White. I mean yes, she had a blind date with Carl Reiner in 2010 on “Hot in Cleveland” when they were both 88. Yes, she played one of four retired “Golden Girls” living together in Florida, none of whom were Jewish but, y’know. And yes, she was on the…
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How an antisemitic attack gave rise to a pro-IDF social media movement
After two Brooklyn 21-year-olds wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with the logo for the Israel Defense Forces were allegedly attacked by two men who called them “dirty Jews,” a social media movement is striking back. The #IDFshirtchallenge asks users to post pictures of themselves proudly sporting their IDF apparel on both Twitter and Instagram, and figures such…
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22 absolutely on-the-mark pop culture predictions for 2022
2021 was a year of new beginnings — not just for our newly reopened society, but also for the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to mutate into increasingly scary-sounding novel Greek letter variants. And so, we end 2021 on a note of uncertainty. In a year like this, when Taylor Swift surprised us with a 10-minute…
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