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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James Carville tells Democrats to ‘start speaking Yiddish’
James Carville thinks Yiddish should be the language of voter outreach. Well, kind of. In an interview with Vox, the longtime political consultant and “Muppets” cast member expressed his concern about “jargon-y language” surrounding subjects like race, suggesting a more accessible form of messaging for Democrats. “I always tell people that we’ve got to stop…
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Is Netflix’s newest Israeli import too American to succeed in America?
Aside from the Hebrew, “Blackspace,” the Israeli thriller just acquired by Netflix for international distribution, feels like it’s set in America. It takes place in a blandly unidentifiable high school building. The kids are all secular, dressed in crop tops and shorts — not a kippah to be seen. And, most American of all, the…
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A fond farewell to Bob Fass, rabbi of a radical radio congregation
I’ve been a member of two unconventional congregations in New York. One was in the East Village and was financed by several lawyers in the Bronx. Hardly anyone paid dues but our Hasidic rabbi still fed his gaggle of converts, Baal Tshuvahs and crusty Lower East Side geezers, including a Jew known as Murphy who…
The Latest
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The secret Jewish history of cicadas
Do you hear that? What’s that buzzing noise? If you live between Tennessee and New York — especially if you live in Ohio, Maryland, or the Virginias — and if it’s mid-to-late May or June, chances are good that what you’re hearing are cicadas. Specifically, male representatives of “Brood X,” or “the Great Eastern Brood,”…
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The 2021 Oscars had Borscht Belt resort vibes
If you’re like me, you were hoping there was an envelope mixup. We’d seen it before at far more polished ceremonies. The 2021 Oscars, which broke with tradition by announcing Best Actor as the final award on Sunday, seemed designed from tip-to-tail to honor the memory of Chadwick Boseman. And then he lost to Anthony…
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This traditionally trained scribe is bending the rules — literally
Kalman Delmoor is a classically trained Hebrew scribe, or sofer, who sits in the Yochanan Ben Zakai historic synagogue, one of the Four Sephardi Synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem. But he doesn’t spend his days writing tefillin or mezuzot. Instead, he turns passages from Torah or liturgy into artwork — some colorful, some…
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Jewish music in Germany after the Holocaust
Read this article in Yiddish. Tina Frühauf Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989 Oxford University Press, 2021, 644 pp. Immediately after World War II, the German rabbi Leo Baeck, who had survived the war in the concentration camp Terezin, declared: “The history of German Jews has ended once and for…
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Blacks and Jews — united as subjects of hate
The British historian Tudor Parfitt, author of “Black Jews in Africa and the Americas,” and “The Jews of Ethiopia,” has long investigated interactions among Jewish communities around the world. His latest book, “Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Antisemitism & Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich” examines the longstanding coexistence of antisemitism and anti-Black…
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Why I love Aaron Sorkin (really)
Here are some things I’ve learned from Aaron Sorkin. Harvard was founded in 1636, but there’s a statue on campus that says it was founded in 1638. The Bible forbids planting different crops side-by-side. The street name for chloroacetone is tear gas. The best way to seem smart and articulate is to rattle off obscure…
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Is Netflix’s new sprawling fantasy the next ‘Game of Thrones’?
Growing up, I was a voracious reader. But, to my father’s chagrin (“Read some real books!”), it wasn’t Mark Twain or even Judy Blume I gobbled up — it was fantasy. I read Harry Potter, of course, but also obscure books featuring magical knights or shape-shifting girls. As an adult, I have also learned to…
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In the Oscar shorts category, stories of fraught relationships in Israel
This year’s five Oscar-nominated live action shorts are strong, disturbing and concise (the longest is 45 minutes). Among the issues they explore are law and order, immigration and interracial relations. “Two Distant Strangers” examines police brutality and the African-American’s nightmarish anxiety that he will inevitably encounter it. “Feeling Through” explores the unlikely bond between a…
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