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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Barbra Streisand’s brand-new duet with Bob Dylan is a whole lot different than you might think
Though Dylan and Streisand's voices may seem ill-suited to each other, the two complement each other gorgeously on 'The Very Thought of You'
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Mark Bittman is calling for a revolution
Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal By Mark Bittman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 384 pages, $28 It’s fun to pee while walking in the ocean drinking a beer; it’s psychopathic to poop while sitting in the tub counting your money. Sadly, though, we humans are now essentially engaged in that sick…
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The WeWork documentary will keep you guessing how Adam Neumann got away with it
Adam Neumann is a sweaty, frazzled, farting mess. In the opening moments of “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn,” we see the coworking visionary struggling through buzzwords and business speak. He rocks on his feet and paces as he reads from a prompter. It’s hard to see how anyone might…
The Latest
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In ‘Shiva Baby,’ Jewish anxiety gets so bad that it turns into a horror movie
I am not claustrophobic. But watching “Shiva Baby,” 26-year-old Emma Seligman’s first feature film, I felt the walls closing in on me. Ariel Marx’s high-pitched and plunky soundtrack felt akin to the “Psycho” score’s shrieking violins and I could feel my cortisol rising throughout the entire runtime. While the film bills itself as a comedy,…
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Life is finite, ‘Shtisel’ is eternal
After a year of pandemic, when it often feels like time is standing still, the new season of “Shtisel” reminds us that life is always moving relentlessly forward. In fact, season 3 of the show suggests that it is art alone which can transcend time. In the opening frame of the season, Akiva Shtisel’s paintbrush…
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Once a private investigator, now he preserves memories of Holocaust survivors
For Heshy Rubinstein, a Brooklyn photographer who has interviewed some 600 survivors over the past 15 years, Holocaust documentation is a family affair. The 62-year-old Borough Park resident and son of survivors from Hungary recalls how his son, Yossi, a curious child who voraciously read about the Holocaust, started interviewing his grandparents and several of…
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August 18: Israel Therapy: For the conflicted (a three-part virtual series)
This three-part series is in partnership with The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center. It will take place on June 16, July 14 and August 18 at 11:30 AM ET / 8:30 AM PT Register here. Are you anxious [about Israel’s politics or policies]? Feeling depressed [about its future]? Do you struggle to talk about it with…
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Marianne Williamson’s out of this world fix for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Israelis and Palestinians have this much in common: Both seem to smile and nod when Marianne Williamson’s on her nonsense. On Tuesday the self-help author, one-time presidential candidate and “Avatar” superfan was trending on Twitter for her recent podcast interview with director James Cameron, where she revealed that she had quoted his giant blue cat…
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Tom Stoppard’s early genius and late reckoning with Jewish identity
Tom Stoppard: A Life. By Hermione Lee. Knopf, 896 pages In 1993, Tom Stoppard was in rehearsals at London’s National Theatre for “Arcadia,” his epoch-hopping and mind-bending tale of love, mathematics, poetry and landscape design which is often considered his finest play. One day, during a lunch break at the National, the celebrated British playwright…
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Who should Jews root for — Godzilla or King Kong?
Entering April, we’re set for a long-awaited showdown between household names. Folks starved for sporting spectacle studied their brackets all through March. Now, as we await the final battle, the world wonders who will come out on top: King Kong or the King of All Monsters. Oh, also, apparently there’s some college basketball going on….
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With success of international shows, fourth season of ‘Shtisel’ seems likely
Fans of the hit drama “Shtisel” had to wait five years for the nine new episodes that dropped on Netflix this weekend. Chances are, they won’t be waiting nearly as long for the next batch. While Netflix has yet to officially announce a fourth season of the popular Israeli series, it’s all but certain they…
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The big (un)stuck boat is a big Passover metaphor
Each year, at Seders around the world, kids perform skits of the Passover story, acting as Moses begging for freedom, or the Pharaoh stubbornly refusing to budge. This year, however, the whole world acted out the Passover story. The part of Pharaoh was magnificently played by Ever Given, an enormous cargo ship that blocked the…
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In Case You Missed It
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Opinion Right-wing insurrectionists tried to topple the German government in 1920 — it’s happening again in Trump’s America
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Theater Can a kinky new Yiddish musical resurrect a lost art — and one man who got spanked to death?
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Fast Forward Josh Shapiro’s Judaism was not why Kamala Harris snubbed him, new book claims
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Yiddish דאָקטוירים פֿון אַן אַנדער שניטDoctors of a different sort
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
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