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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Is it time to start taking beauty pageants seriously?
Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America By Hilary Levey Friedman Beacon Press, 256 pages, $25.95 Beauty pageants have haunted Hilary Levey Friedman since childhood. “I can’t remember ever not knowing what a beauty pageant was,” the Brown University sociologist writes in the opening pages of “Here She Is.” “In…
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Wiley still insists that ‘Jews run the Earth’
British rapper Wiley, who last month went on a 48-hour antisemitic tirade on Twitter before he was banned from the platform, has defended his remarks and insisted his removal from social media proves his point that Jews “run the Earth.” In an August 21 episode of the “1 Po Show,” a YouTube series on the…
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In YIVO’s first digital exhibition, the story of Vilna’s Jews — through the eyes of one girl
“People say I was a naughty child,” 11-year-old Beba Epstein wrote in 1933. She bumped into her parents’ china cabinet, shattering plates. She tore up her cousin Freydke’s best-in-class geography paper. On summer vacation in a resort town, she would run in the streets, and was once nearly hit by a car. We know the…
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Does the new TV series ‘Tehran’ inadvertently glorify the Iranian regime?
A clash between Mossad agents and intelligence agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran forms the basis for “Tehran,” an Israeli TV miniseries debuting in America next month on AppleTV. The series features a storyline no less thrilling than the war of the Titans, and director Daniel Syrkin cleverly utilizes all the exciting elements of…
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The passing of pioneering historian Moses Rischin marks the end of an era
Moses Rischin, the last survivor among the bold group of scholars who created the field of American Jewish history following World War II, died last week in San Francisco at the age of 94. His passing marks the end of an era. Prior to World War II, most of those who wrote American Jewish history…
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Sorry, Lincoln Project. Jared Kushner is not quite the picture of Dorian Gray
Do president’s sons-in-law get portraits in the West Wing? Asking for the Lincoln Project. At press time, the Republican-led anti-Trump group, known for their viral ads excoriating Trump and his enablers, is trending the hashtag #JaredIsEvil. The Jared in question is Kushner, and this time the target is his alleged neglect of states with Democratic…
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Randy Rainbow apologizes for racist and transphobic tweets, cites political harassment
Randy Rainbow has made a name for himself by setting the scandals of the Trump era to music. Now, after dozens of racist and transphobic tweets from several years ago have resurfaced, he has to contend with a scandal of his own. The internet comedian, whose hits include the Carey Underwood riff “Maybe Next Time…
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The 28-year-old studio executive who helped Hollywood survive its first pandemic
The Spanish flu pandemic hit Hollywood hard. The lethal flu strain killed approximately 650,000 U.S. citizens from 1918-19, and threatened to collapse the nascent movie industry. One year before the outbreak, my great-grandfather, pioneer producer Sol M. Wurtzel, arrived to run the original Fox Studio at Sunset Blvd. and Western Ave. Sol had personally experienced…
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Post-‘Unorthodox’ fever, two new streaming services vie for Jewish eyes
Millenials and their boomer parents may have different ideas about Israel and how to be Jewish, but two new streaming services for Jewish and Israeli TV and film are banking on the fact that both groups are hungry for good content. A global pandemic and a clamor to find a replacement for “Unorthodox” form the…
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50 years a feminist, and I’m still learning what suffrage means
I cast my first vote in 1945, when I was five. My mother led me behind the curtain, picked me up so I could reach the levers, pointed to the name William O’Dwyer on the voting machine, and let me do the honors. But first, she told me why “we” wanted O’Dwyer to be the…
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The suffrage movement was racist. Where did Jewish women fit in?
Hilary Danailova’s recent cheerfully titled article “Jewish Suffragists, White Dresses and Yellow Roses” in Hadassah Magazine is intriguing. Jewish suffragists? As a woman who is Jewish and Black, whose mother was a refugee from Nazi Austria and father was from Jamaica, I have always known that the overwhelmingly white Protestant leadership and their followers in…
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Culture Trump wants to honor Hannah Arendt in a ‘Garden of American Heroes.’ Is this a joke?
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Fast Forward The invitation said, ‘No Jews.’ The response from campus officials, at least, was real.
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Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
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Fast Forward Columbia staff receive texts asking if they’re Jewish, as government hunts antisemitic harassment on campus
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Fast Forward Trump nominee Ed Martin, who praised a Nazi sympathizer, also compared Biden to Hitler
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Opinion RFK Jr. and Trump are talking about an ‘autism registry’ — this sounds disturbingly familiar
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Fast Forward Heavy police presence blocks anti-Israel protest in Brooklyn from reaching Jewish neighborhood
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Yiddish קאָקני־ייִדיש“: אַ פּאָדקאַסט, אַ לשון און אַ שטײגער לעבן‘Cockney Yiddish’: A podcast, a language and a way of life
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