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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Today’s Google Doodle has a Yiddish soundtrack
Today’s Google Doodle offers an interactive ode to swing dance — and a bisl Yiddish. Please let me explain. If you visit the search engine today, you’ll find an image of dancers in Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, and, if you click, you’ll hear a jazzy instrumental version of the classic “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn.” The tune,…
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In search of a story of Jewish Vienna, a daughter becomes a detective
Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind By Julie Metz Atria Books, 320 pp, $28 Intended as satire, “The City Without Jews” ended up as prophecy. Published in 1922, the novel imagines an antisemitic Austrian government mobilizing hundreds of boxcars to deport all of Vienna’s Jews….
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Amazon’s plans to buy MGM recall the studio’s origins
Amazon has nabbed a lion in winter. The retail and entertainment giant announced Wednesday that it would acquire MGM, the storied movie studio for $8.5 billion, giving them the keys to franchises like James Bond and Rocky, and landing the flagging studio around $3 billion more than its valuation. If all this consolidation seems like…
The Latest
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Can Sacha Baron Cohen be Borat and still tell the truth?
For a while now, Sacha Baron Cohen has had an issue with juggling multiple personas. On the one hand, as Borat, Bruno and his coterie of characters on “Who is America,” he is a cartoonish sounding board for America’s worst qualities. On the other, he is an increasingly serious out-of-character activist, a full-throated opponent of…
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The Jewish jokes from ‘Friends’ have aged poorly — so has the rest of the show
I grew up in one of those households without cable, a PBS-only child. “Friends” was a show I dreamed of being old enough to be allowed to watch; it felt like the most hip, adult network sitcom. In my teens, I watched it all on DVDs ordered one by one from Netflix, if you remember…
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What if we could resolve generational trauma through…a Holocaust video game?
When I first heard about a new documentary, “Tacheles,” which follows a group of Germans designing a video game about the Holocaust, in which “Jews can defend themselves and Nazis can act humanely,” I thought it sounded like a recipe for disaster. At best, it seemed like a poorly thought-through attempt at catharsis; at worst,…
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The secret Jewish history of ‘The Goon Show’
May 28 marks the 70th anniversary of the influential British radio comedy program “The Goon Show,” which inspired fans from the Monty Python group to John Lennon. The Jewish content of The Goons, comprising comedians Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers as well as the Welsh singer Harry Secombe, is usually overlooked amid the show’s comedic…
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At 80, is Bob Dylan still the voice of his generation?
Because I have a somewhat morbid outlook on life combined with an almost fanatical devotion toward being prepared — a vestige of my year or so in the ranks of the Boy Scouts? — I have been toying with the idea of writing Bob Dylan’s obituary in advance of his actual death for at least…
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Music How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’
A Forward investigation in 9 verses
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For Albert Camus, events in Gaza would have seemed all too familiar
The situation was impossibly precarious and a solution seemed practically impossible. Two communities, one composed of indigenous Arabs and the other of mostly European immigrants, laid claim to the same swathe of arid hinterland and Mediterranean coastline. Fragile coexistence had given way to fratricidal conflict; one side mobilized technological advantages and the other employed terrorist…
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Don’t reduce Louise Bourgeois’s art to an Oedipus complex
Louise Bourgeois did not trust words; this is what numerous articles and essays about the artist will tell you. That fact is also mentioned at “Louise Bourgeois: Freud’s Daughter,” a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum, which shows more than 50 of the French-born artist’s works alongside pages and pages of musings and notes she…
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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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Film & TV ‘Caught Stealing’ gives us tough, Hasidic drug lords — is it good for the Jews?
In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish אַ וויכטיק ווערק פֿון מוזיקאָלאָג משה בערעגאָווסקי פּובליקירט צום ערשטן מאָלImportant work by musicologist Moyshe Beregovsky published for the first time
דאָס בוך נעמט אַרײַן דעם ייִדישן טעקסט, זײַן רוסישע איבערזעצונג און אַ קאָמענטאַר אויף ביידע שפּראַכן.
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Fast Forward Jewish judge overturns Trump administration’s Harvard funding freeze, ruling antisemitism allegations were a ‘smokescreen’
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Fast Forward Israeli fashion brand launches campaign protesting starvation in Gaza
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Fast Forward Jewish Studies faculty at U of Oregon rally to protect their jobs from feared budget cuts
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