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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Did Chuck Woolery just have a ‘Hitler was right’ moment?
Chuck Woolery, the arch-conservative game show host and catheter pitchman was slammed on Twitter for appearing to take an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” approach to… Hitler? In a Memorial Day post, Woolery tweeted “Critical Race theory is based on Critical theory, given to the world by Marxists from the Frankfort School [sic]…
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From the confinement of a ‘ghetto,’ the liberation of great art
The other day, I looked up the word “ghetto” in the online Urban Dictionary, in order to get a sense of how the word is being used in the vernacular these days. While the definition provided there is problematic and poorly written, I was struck, however, by the very first sentence: “When someone is to…
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The secret Jewish history of ‘The Love Boat’
In light of the May 29 death of actor Gavin MacLeod, celebrated for portraying Captain Merrill Stubing on ABC-TV’s “The Love Boat,” it seems like a good time to take a deeper look into the Jewish elements in the hit show, which ran from 1977 to 1986, followed by further special episodes until 1990. Executive…
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The Tulsa massacre wasn’t a ‘race riot’ — it was a pogrom
One hundred years ago, a pogrom destroyed a community. A pogrom is, according to John Klier, who was the subject’s leading authority and author of numerous seminal studies on Russian Jews, “an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic or social group. It usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum…
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Books Why do we keep turning Holocaust survivor stories into self-help books?
On a recent segment of “The Today Show,” a cadre of well-coiffed hosts discussed the life of Eddie Jaku, a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor and the author of “The Happiest Man on Earth,” a memoir about his imprisonment in Auschwitz. Grainy photos of concentration camp prisoners alternated with clips from an interview with Jaku and videos…
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The year that I’ll remember, the year my grandfather won’t
Around this time last year, I held my grandpa’s hand in the ER of a New York City hospital. Half-drawn curtains formed alcoves that revealed slivers of the patients nearby — faces, an arm. I looked from one to the other. They were alone. They seemed to be asleep. They were hooked up to machines…
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Here’s a bad idea: What if Disney’s ‘Homeward Bound’ was about the Holocaust?
Animal characters have been used powerfully in Holocaust stories — think Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel “Maus.” So even though the newest addition to the Holocaust canon, Lynn Roth’s movie “Shepherd: The Story of a Jewish Dog,” might initially raise your hackles, it seems promising. It’s based on an award-winning book, “The Jewish Dog,” by…
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The Tony-winning drama of the Oslo Accords is now a film
J.T. Rogers and Bartlett Sher always knew their history play had a lot to teach us today. But they never wanted it to be quite this relevant. “When we first did the piece, that was 2016, and as much as it was about Palestine and Israel, it was really about Republicans and Democrats,” said Sher,…
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On a search for family heritage in Poland — via a virtual Jewish tour
I was looking for my roots, for a connection to my heritage. My late father was a Holocaust survivor and I was investigating his life before the Nazi invasion, when the pandemic closed many archives down. But I kept researching online and when Europe started opening up again in the spring, I arranged for us…
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Remembering Walter Kissinger — Henry’s menschy and self-effacing brother
News of the demise of Walter Kissinger, who died May 3 at age 96, was made public discreetly and belatedly, matching the relatively reserved persona with which he went through life as the less attention-grabbing younger brother of the American Jewish politician Henry Kissinger. Despite his own achievements in business and philanthropy as what Fortune…
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How do I love Orchard Beach? Let me count the ways!
A middle-aged man, dressed for summer, exits his parked car and approached a group of people, four of whom sit on folding chairs around a portable bridge table, playing dominos. On any given day, during the warmer, offseason months, groups of fun-seekers occupy the better part of the eastern section of the Orchard Beach parking…
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Sports Forget being caught on camera at a Coldplay concert — I was caught on Shabbat at Yankee Stadium
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Fast Forward After Netanyahu and Cindy McCain meet, she calls out ‘desperation’ in Gaza, and he accuses her of ‘misrepresentation’
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Fast Forward Coldplay welcomed Israeli fans onstage ‘as equal humans.’ Why are some Jewish people mad?
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Film & TV ‘Caught Stealing’ gives us tough, Hasidic drug lords — is it good for the Jews?
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Looking Forward What Black journalists covering Confederate monuments taught me about fighting antisemitism today
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Film & TV A dizzying Kafka biopic that isn’t really Kafkaesque
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