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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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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On William Shatner’s 90th birthday, a reminder of when he could laugh at himself
William Shatner AKA Captain Kirk Turns 90
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How macaroons became a must for Passover — even if no one likes them
I grew up with no macaroons. My mother was raised on almond macaroons that her grandmother made, but the experience was hard to replicate by the time I came around. “Every time I saw an almond macaroon, I bought it, but in bakeries you mostly only see coconut,” she told me. “It’s a travesty.” This…
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Blu-Ray set of restored Yiddish classics comes alive with excellent commentary
Read this article in Yiddish There is an expression in Yiddish—di kale iz tsu sheyn—the bride is too beautiful. Basically, the problem is—it’s too good. This is exactly my problem with a new Blu-ray disk set “The Jewish Soul: Ten Classics of Yiddish Cinema,” issued by Kino Lorber. It took me a while to start…
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Sweatpants, sneakers, and lots of coffee: How the Jewish world is working from home
When schoolchildren of the future learn about the chaos and despair of the coronavirus pandemic, I hope they also learn that we explored Mars from our kitchen tables. As NASA’s Perseverance rover began its search for life on Mars, scientist Sanjeev Gupta made another kind of history by sharing pictures of himself controlling the rover…
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