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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Your 2021 guide to virtual Passover seders
While the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and loosened restrictions on gatherings will allow some families, friends, and congregations to be together this Passover, the majority of us are preparing for yet another pandemic Passover. Last year, Jewish communities around the country came together virtually to celebrate the holiday, the first of what would become a full…
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On Houdini’s 147th birthday, the incredible stories you never heard
Writer’s Note: Today would have been Harry Houdini’s 147th birthday. At least we think so — he always said he was born April 6, possibly out of ignorance of the true date. It’s one more bit of dissembling from a man notorious for invented biography. In honor of the occasion, we are reprinting this piece…
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George Segal brought Jewishness to the screen — even when he was playing non-Jews
George Segal, who died on Mar. 23 at age 87, had a singular screen impact as an explicitly and implicitly Jewish actor starting in the 1960s. Remembered best by younger audiences for delivering sitcom lines at rapid fire tempo in the series “Just Shoot Me!” (1997–2003) and “The Goldbergs” (2013–2021), Segal was an infinitely more…
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Almost 900 pages about Philip Roth — and yet the crucial part goes missing
Philip Roth, The Biography By Blake Bailey Norton, 896 pages $40 Philip Roth. Love him or hate him. Me? I loved him. As is the case for many Jewish American novelists, his work informed mine in countless ways. Also, I worked in the twilight of the New York publishing era Roth came up in. Though…
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If you’re looking for a Passover anthem, this is…not it
If you haven’t heard of Trisha Paytas, I recommend you stop reading here and continue on in blissful ignorance. If you follow the ever-controversial Youtube-TikTok-social media figure, you will be unsurprised by her new music video release. Titled “I Love You Moses,” it is part Passover banger and part love song to her Israeli fiancé,…
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As in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ small disasters foretell the destruction of a world
The Slaughterman’s Daughter By Yaniv Iczkovits; translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf Schocken Books, 515 pages, $28.99 As history, family lore, and Yiddish fiction all attest, the 19th-century Russian Empire held numerous dangers for Jews in the Pale of Settlement: grinding poverty, pogroms, conscription into the Czar’s army. Sholem Aleichem’s folkloric stories mined this…
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‘Why We Need You, Molly Picon’ — a poem
WHY WE NEED YOU, MOLLY PICON Because you were born two years before the birth of the twentieth century and your mother sewed for the theater, because your father was too brilliant to work, blamed your mother for his two girls, so he moved out, because you caught the eye of a drunk on a…
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How an Israeli video whiz created the typewriter supercut that’s helping you be (or feel) productive at home
Typewriters ooze productivity — which might be why we love using them to procrastinate. If you’ve been on the internet in the last month, you probably spent two minutes and three seconds watching this mesmerizing montage of cinematic typewriters. The supercut, which went viral on the inspiration-seeking corners of the internet, is set to Leroy…
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How the pandemic freed me from the neurosis-inducing rules of Passover
For my doctoral dissertation, I wrote on a much-misunderstood 18th century heretic named Jacob Frank. Yet I hadn’t really considered the relevance of Frank’s antinomianism – the belief that transgressing the law is a religious or ethical duty – to my own life. Until this year. Though Frank is often associated with transgressive sexuality and…
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In Taipei, an artist prepares for a Seder with his own Haggadah
Leon Fenster’s community is hosting what may be one of the largest legal Pesach Seders of 2021 — they’ll be using his Haggadah. The 34-year-old artist will lead the ceremony for a crowd of around 200 people in Taipei, Taiwan, where he has remained through most of the pandemic. It is a city in a…
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For Barney Zumoff, a giant and a mentsch
Barnett Zumoff, who died at age 94 on Mar. 21, was one of the rare people who inspire awe by the sheer range of skills at which they operate at a high level. A noted clinical and research physician with many significant publications, Zumoff achieved the rank of Brigadier General in the U.S. Air Force…
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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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