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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Chatting with Charlotte Gainsbourg about her mother, Jane Birkin, in Cannes
“When you were about 14 years old, I was dying to see you naked,” Jane Birkin tells her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg towards the beginning of “Jane par Charlotte,” a documentary about the duo that had its world premiere earlier this week at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s one of the most provocative moments in the…
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Tavi Gevinson was the first influencer. On ‘Gossip Girl,’ she’s facing the consequences.
“Gossip Girl” is supposed to be a show about wealthy, terrible teens cheating on each other and being awful to service workers. But in the new version of “Gossip Girl,” the teachers are the center of attention. They run the Gossip Girl Instagram account, they blackmail their students and they’re even — problematically — at…
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Couldn’t make Cannes? The (James) Caan Film Festival awaits.
While the film industry is busy taking in the sun — and, one imagines, some movies — in the French coastal resort town of Cannes, Eric Hynes is once again thinking about Caan — James Caan. “I think he’s underrated as a sort of reader of lines,” said Hynes, curator of film at Astoria’s Museum…
The Latest
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WATCH NOW: November 3: The most copied Jewish building in the world
Watch now. Around the world, there are 35 replicas of 770 Eastern Parkway, the world headquarters of Lubavitch-Chabad in Brooklyn. Meet the photographers who have been documenting every one of these replicas, from Brazil to Milan to New Jersey, the historian who uncovered the building’s surprisingly secular history, and the architect who designed one of…
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The new ‘Gossip Girl’ is supposed to be woke — so why won’t it discuss racism?
“You know you missed me — XOXO.” So read a sign trailing behind an airplane flying over Rockaway Beach last weekend. It was mysterious, but almost any millennial woman would know instantly what it was about. “Gossip Girl,” the hit 2007 show about wealthy New York City teens cheating on each other and drinking martinis,…
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In Surfside, a Jewish tragedy receives a Jewish response
The volunteers trudged to the mansion’s front door, their heads covered, most of them wearing the same navy T-shirts they had been wearing all week, their uniform. It was about four hours shy of eight full days since the men of Hatzalah of South Florida responded to a call about a building in Surfside that…
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Users reported an Instagram filter for featuring a swastika. It’s still up.
If you’ve ever wondered how you might look fully covered in tattoos, there are Instagram filters that can help you imagine it by projecting images onto your arms and chest. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose the tats— and one popular filter, called “Old School,” places a Native American feather headdress adorned with a swastika…
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Is Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Hollywood’ novel an apologia for Roman Polanski?
Quentin Tarantino changed film history with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” No, the film wasn’t a breakthrough work of cinema, rather, it literally rewrote the Tinseltown timeline by imagining an alternate ending to an epoch-defining tragedy. Two years later, Tarantino’s novelization of the 2019 movie — out now, complete with mass market-paperback packaging and…
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These Facebook groups help writers find jobs — and Jews who discuss Israel are being kicked out
Binder groups — a secretive network of Facebook communities to help writers who aren’t cisgender men find writing jobs — are supposed to be safe spaces. But recently, Jews have been feeling as though they’ve become just as unwelcome as men. In the last few weeks, one group with approximately 12,300 members, Binders Full of…
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Sacrifice through Heresy
Read this article in Yiddish Qorbanot: Offerings Poems by Alisha Kaplan SUNY Press, 2021 Many people believe that sacrificing for a greater good is a virtue. In the Jewish tradition, even martyrdom in the right context is called “the sanctification of God’s holy name.” But what should you do when holiness is weakened — by…
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‘Pride is also a Yizkor’: Remembering LGBTQ Jews we’ve lost
“Pride is also a Yizkor.” Those were the words of the Forward’s archivist, Chana Pollack, early in Pride month, as she and I discussed her planned dive into the Forward’s archives in search of its queer history. Her point: Generations of LGBTQ Jews who have faced exclusion from their families and communities have wondered who…
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