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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Why the new matzah emoji is not kosher for Passover
When you’re typing on an iPhone, the autofill interface tries to guess the next word you mean to type, or finish the word you’re currently typing. This is also how it suggest emojis — type in “fire,” and the flame emoji will pop up, which is very helpful given that there are 3,521 emojis to…
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Digging into Holocaust history and finding a sort of gold
Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure By Menachem Kaiser Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 277 pages, $27 Menachem Kaiser’s third-generation Holocaust memoir, in keeping with the genre, is an act of reclamation – or at least an attempt at one. In “Plunder,” Kaiser admits to the limits of his project and confesses his envy…
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Kosher-for-Passover dog food? I wouldn’t recommend it
Those hoping for an observant hound might be in for an unpleasant surprise
The Latest
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Statues of men grace parks and town squares, so why does RBG get a shopping mall?
Grocery shopping in Brooklyn has been as hellish, if not more so, than everywhere else in the pandemic. Trader Joe’s lines snaked fully around the block even during wintry weather. All year, the doors to City Point Brooklyn, where my closest TJ’s is located, have represented the joys of indoor warmth, everything bagel seasoning and…
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This year’s Oscar nominees prove the Academy is more devoted to itself than to diversity
For the Academy, there was only room for one, wigged, weird-accented performance from Sacha Baron Cohen. Naturally, it went to the one scripted by Aaron Sorkin and dripping with sanctimony. The Oscars announced the full roster of nominees Monday morning, marking nearly a year without cinemas, exempting many of the top contenders from a theatrical…
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The Grammys highlighted Jews of color — but picked a strange champion for racial justice
In real life, Taylor Swift dates a Brit known for playing Nazis. But in the fantasy realm of the Grammys, she shacked up in an astroturf-peated A-Frame with boychik producers Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff; they went on to win Album of the Year for “Folklore.” This was just one vision in a strange, socially…
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‘Nomadland’ and ‘Borat 2’ are the same movie — but only one deserves the Oscar
Good and bad seem to be out of fashion; these days, it’s all about better and worse. The new president is praised for being better than the Antichrist. Wage slavery is praised for existing at all, because any job is better than no job, and $15 an hour is better than $7.25. In a bizarre…
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WATCH NOW: May 25: Police reform and accountability: How the public keeps tabs on our police system
Watch the recording here. How are journalists holding the NYPD accountable? Join Molly Boigon, an investigative reporter at the Forward in conversation with Joseph Aron, the lawyer who represented the Forward in a public records suit against the NYPD and Eric Umansky, an award-winning journalist at ProPublica. Hear how they had to fight to gain…
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Art Happy 100th Birthday to Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee
Editor’s Note: This article was published originally on February 21, 2016. We are revisiting it on the occasion of Al Jaffee’s 100th birthday. On a snowy February afternoon, Al Jaffee, my childhood hero, invited me into his well-lit studio in Midtown Manhattan. The walls were covered with his drawings, images from Mad Magazine and a…
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On saying kaddish over Zoom
My mother died four days into 2021. Zoom burial, Zoom shiva, and now, Zoom kaddish. Every morning, I log on and watch the usual suspects arrive at my synagogue’s Shacharit service. They pop up, one by one, in their boxes. Hi, everyone. Hi, S. who puts her earrings on before the service starts. Hi, A….
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In this experimental drone film, ‘The Big Lebowski’s Jesus rolls again
Jesus. He shows up on toast. He appears on dental X-rays. He manifests in Lane 5 of a bowling alley in a viral drone video. Sorry, we don’t mean that itinerant Jewish preacher from the first century. We mean the John Turturro character from “The Big Lebowski.” In a 90 second short, directed by Anthony…
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