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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In Lakewood, New Jersey, a garden blooms — and so does a community
Wearing a broadbrimmed straw garden hat, Tova Herskovitz looked over the raised beds and smiled. The first carrot tops were poking through the chocolate-colored soil, the purple kale was already looking hearty, and so was the mint. “Everybody should take some mint home with them,” she said. As a longtime organizer, Herskovitz loves it when…
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With #MyOrthodoxLife, religious women say Netflix doesn’t speak for them
It looked like a pretty ordinary Instagram post: a smiling woman in a trendy periwinkle dress, posed against a background of roses. But Alex Fleksher, the woman in the picture, was on a mission. She wanted people to know that plenty of women “are leading happy, healthy, and fulfilled Orthodox lives,” she wrote. “I’m a…
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Ben & Jerry’s is leaving Israeli settlements and people online are taking it very seriously
Ben & Jerry’s has historically been a very vocal advocate of social justice and environmental issues. At the top of the company’s Twitter page, a thread condemning the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is pinned. On 4/20, instead of making jokes about stoners eating ice cream, the company bought billboards to criticize racial bias…
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WATCH NOW: December 14: An Evening With Writer-Director Nicholas Meyer
Watch now. The legendary Oscar-nominated mastermind of “The Seven-Percent Solution,” “Time After Time,” and three classic “Star Trek” films joins Forward executive editor Adam Langer for a discussion of his illustrious career, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and his latest novel, “The Return of the Pharaoh,” which follows Sherlock Holmes on a death-defying…
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Bob Dylan’s overblown new music video offers only a ‘Shadow’ of transcendence
I confess that I was in a pretty bad mood yesterday when it was time to log in to view “Shadow Kingdom,” a global, online pay-per-view event starring Bob Dylan. I had spent a large part of the day reading deeply into the news — about the upswing in COVID, catastrophic and deadly natural events…
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Jews have survived a lot — and this artist is preparing us for the apocalypse
The last 16 months have felt like an apocalypse movie at many points — a global pandemic, the attack on the Capitol, a massive drought and widespread forest fires in the Western U.S., even those murder hornets that briefly made headlines. Yet to artist and architect Daniel Toretsky, the catastrophes felt familiar; Jews have faced…
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How a Jewish spy infiltrated the U.S. atomic program — and helped the Soviet Union build the bomb
Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away By Ann Hagedorn Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $28 Was the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s nothing but political hysteria? For all its deleterious effects on free speech rights, reputations, and careers, it seems not. Cold War fears of the domestic threat…
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WATCH NOW: December 8: The Chosen at 40: A conversation with the writer-director of the classic Jewish film
Watch the conversation here. In 1981, Jeremy Kagan wrote and directed the classic film “The Chosen,” based on Chaim Potok’s novel about two boys from very different Jewish families in 1940’s Brooklyn. To celebrate the movie’s 40th anniversary, Kagan will join the Forward’s executive editor Adam Langer for a discussion of the movie and its…
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July 26-30: A Yiddish Renaissance: A Virtual Concert Celebration
This virtual concert celebration will start streaming on Monday, July 26 at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT and will be available for viewing through Friday, July 30th at 2 PM ET / 11 a.m. PT. Register here. The Forward is proud to sponsor this Virtual Concert Celebrating the Revival of Yiddish in Culture,…
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Why there were more Jews than Christians in Dante’s ‘Paradise’ (and no Jews of his time in Dante’s ‘Hell’)
This year, commemorations of the 700th anniversary of the death of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of “The Divine Comedy,” have scarcely addressed the subject of how Dante wrote about Jews. Dante places a number of Old Testament Jews, including Abraham, Sarah, Rachel and Joshua in Paradise. Because some of the limited space is…
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Adolf Eichmann is alive and well and living in America
In a recent column in the Washington Post, the conservative commentator Michael Gerson reflected on Republican opposition to the government’s efforts to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19. Perplexed by the lies parroted by GOP politicians and pundits, he observed that neither opportunism nor fanaticism fully explained their behavior. “This is hard,” Gerson confessed, “to get my…
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News ‘It’s the Jews’: San Diego mosque shooters decried ‘the universal enemy’ in hate-filled manifesto
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News Nearly half of young U.S. Jews want to replace Israel with binational state, poll finds
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Music For Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, an 85-minute playlist
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Opinion Mamdani has made ample efforts for Jews. How come no one is telling that story?
In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish פֿיר צײַטן פֿון יאָר מיט פֿינף סאָנעטן פֿון אַ גאַנץ יאָרFour seasons in five sonnets
דער זומער איז אַן עקשן, ער וויל ניט, וויל ניט קומען, הגם אויף בייטן וואַקסן צעקווייטיקט שוין די בלומען.
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Opinion My university is enabling the Trump administration’s worst fallacies on antisemitism
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Yiddish World How ‘Hacks’ botched its Yiddish line
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Books For the Jews of Venice, an uneasy history of scapegoating and grudging tolerance