Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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I have seen the future of America — in a pastrami sandwich in Queens
San Wei, which serves pastrami sandwiches along with churros and biang biang noodles, represents an immigrant's fulfillment of the American dream
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‘Schitt’s Creek’ and all things Jewish from a very socially-distanced Emmys
Most Emmys nights, the stars are out in force. In 2020, they stayed in, and didn’t so much take home awards as have them delivered to their doorstep. Host Jimmy Kimmel worked the room at an empty Staples Center, bare but for a skeleton camera crew and the occasional socially-distanced celebrity cameo. Yet for the…
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Books In Nessa Rapoport’s ‘Evening,’ the sun sets on a complicated sisterhood
Midway through “Evening,” Nessa Rapoport’s second novel, two teenage sisters stand in the bathroom, squabbling. Eve is readying herself for a date with Laurie, an older boy who happens to be a friend of her sister, Tam, and Tam is scolding her: For the steam with which she’s filled their bathroom, the perfume she’s sprayed…
The Latest
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What would Ginsburg do? Move forward with hope.
Several weeks ago, my mother announced that she had a present for me: She’d ordered me a Ruth Bader Ginsburg face mask. It’s a funny little thing: Good, thick, cream-colored fabric patterned over with drawings of miniature RBGs. When it arrived, we agreed that I would save it to wear when I returned to my…
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Remembering RBG as a lover of opera and diva of human rights
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s nickname “The Notorious R.B.G.” was a humorous allusion to The Notorious B.I.G., the stage name of the rapper Biggie Smalls (born Christopher Wallace). Yet as her admirers know, Ginsburg, who died on September 18 at age 87, was more attached to classical music, especially opera. Born in Brooklyn, her first such experience…
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What’s the deal with all these motherless Disney princesses?
Perhaps it is because I am a mother now, or because I lost my own mother too soon, that I am a tad sensitive to a lack of maternal characters in television and film. But plunging head-first into Disney princesses as soon as my daughter was old enough to watch cartoons, I began to notice…
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Why a defining moment of HBO’s ‘I May Destroy You’ was scored by a synagogue choir
At the end of the eighth episode of HBO’s breakthrough series, “I May Destroy You,” the protagonist, a Ghanaian British writer named Arabella Essiedu awakes on the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea, an emotional wreck stranded thousands of miles from home. A string of catastrophe and failure has led Arabella here — her rape in…
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America’s forced sterilization program inspired Hitler — and the new complaint against ICE
Dawn Wooten, a nurse who rocketed into national attention after filing a whistleblower report alleging that immigrant women detained by ICE at a private facility were being subjected to forced hysterectomies, looked straight at the camera. “I had several detained women on numerous occasions that would come to me and say, ‘Ms. Wooten, I had…
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Woody Allen’s latest looks just like the one before it, and the one before that…
“I’ve had a chance to look at my life over the last few weeks, and I realize I’ve made a lot of bad decisions.” This line, delivered by Wallace Shawn, toward the end of a trailer for Woody Allen’s “Rifkin’s Festival,” premiering at the San Sebastian Film Festival September 18, would appear to be the…
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Norman Lear at 98 — once again an Emmy winner, always a mensch
History was made this week when an Emmy was awarded to 98-year-old Norman Lear, the oldest winner in the history of the Television Academy. A victim of the depression, as a young boy, he’d hoped to one day be able to flip a quarter, as his press agent Uncle Jack did to him whenever he…
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Eisenhower Memorial honors a general and president who preserved memory of the Holocaust
There’s a story about Dwight D. Eisenhower that has become the stuff of legend. After witnessing the horrors of Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, he told his men who liberated the camps to collect testimony and film and photograph everything, because “the day will…
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Belarusians use Chagall to slam police crackdowns on protesters
Marc Chagall loved his flying figures. Some have speculated that the recurring image of humble folks floating through the sky and over cityscapes is a riff on his own identification as a luftmentsh, or “airman,” a dreamer with big ideas but no concrete plans to realize them. But to anchor Chagall to this one meaning…
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