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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Walter Mondale’s keen understanding of Jewish history
Walter Mondale, who died April 19 at age 93, was celebrated for his contributions to The Camp David Accords, political agreements signed by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978. At the time, Mondale, previously a longtime senator from Minnesota, was serving as US vice president during the presidency of…
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RIP to Jim Steinman, a wonderful, vampire-obsessed songwriter
Jim Steinman was the best kind of weird. The Grammy-winning songwriter, known for his epic rock compositions for Meat Loaf, Celine Dion and Bonnie Tyler, died Monday at the age of 73, TMZ was first to report. Steinman’s songs were unmistakable in their bravura, musical theater influence and vampiric subtext. Yes. “Total Eclipse of the…
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Police brutality is real and deadly — I saw it up close
JULY 1980 It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was carrying my sax as I headed for an audition at a theater company on the South Side of Chicago. I figured if I got off the el at 35th Street, I’d be just a few blocks from my Indiana Avenue destination. I was in a…
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Activist, Professor, Politician, Aesthete — the many contradictions of Edward Said
You could read any of Edward Said’s books, but you couldn’t take them home with you. Looking back, this was obviously a metaphor for something or other. At the time it seemed like a simple-enough fact—but then, I was only a freshman. The Edward Said Reading Room opened in the spring of 2011, eight years…
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How I became the Yankees’ Jewish star (and made friends with Thurman Munson along the way)
This essay has been excerpted from “The Captain & Me: On and Off The Field with Thurman Munson” by Ron Blomberg with Dan Epstein and is printed with the permission of Triumph Books.. I was lucky to get drafted when I did. If the Yankees hadn’t been so bad in 1966, they wouldn’t have had…
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Behind Tucker Carlson’s white replacement rhetoric, a frightening antisemitic history
Replacement theory is inextricably tied to a hatred of Jews.
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Is the Israeli soccer team cursed?
The Israeli national soccer team is over 70 years old, but has caused everybody a lot of aggravation – especially over the past 50 years. The current aggravation is the topic of “Common Goal,”a fascinating documentary by Shuki Guzik that had its U.S. premiere at the Other Israel Film Festival in 2020 and which came…
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Christians are enraged by this music video. Why aren’t Jews upset too?
Lil Nas X is an expert at generating controversy. His latest music video, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” features him twirling down to Hell on a stripper pole and giving Satan a lapdance before snapping his neck and stealing his crown. For an extra bump of publicity, he also launched 666 retrofitted Nike sneakers,…
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In a historical time-bomb, echoes of Kafka and portents of Hitchcock
The Passenger By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz Translated from German by Philip Boehm Metropolitan Books, 288 pp, $24.99 Unable to remember the phone number of the “friend” who offered to buy his house for an extortionist trifle, Otto Silbermann reflects that: “All misfortune stems from forgetfulness.” In “The Passenger,” Silbermann, a wealthy Jewish businessman, attempts to…
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My life as the big cheese at Murray’s
In 1987, bankrupt and divorced, I washed up in Greenwich Village at my brother’s apartment in the John Adams on Sixth Avenue He’d left Wall Street to do tax law in the entertainment business in Los Angeles, and told me I could crash at his place until it sold. I’d left the family grocery business…
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Goin’ back to Zabar’s Zabar’s Zabar’s!
When did it really start? Was it when I made the appointment for my first COVID shot? Was it after I received the shot and heard Dr Fauci say that the first shot provided 85 percent immunity? Or was it after the next shot, the second shot, at which point 85 percent to 92 percent…
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