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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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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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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An extraordinary yearning to understand a father’s life
Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow By Deborah Tannen Ballantine Books, 272 pages, $28 You may know the Georgetown University sociolinguist Deborah Tannen from her groundbreaking 1990 examination of how gender impacts conversational styles, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.” Or from…
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Does celebs’ Instagram boycott stand a chance of changing Facebook?
If you’ve noticed your Instagram feed is a little quieter than usual today, there’s a good reason. As part of the activist movement Stop Hate for Profit’s “Week of Action,” over two dozen A-Listers are participating in a one-day Instagram “freeze” — meaning no pet pics, snaps of acai pudding or sun-dappled shots of infinity…
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BDS calls for boycott of Israeli-Arab internet personality Nas Daily
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is urging Arab content creators to boycott the massively popular Arab-Israeli internet personality, Nas Daily. Nas Daily is the handle of 28-year-old Nuseir Yassin, whose Facebook page, featuring cheery one-minute travelogues, has over 17 million followers. His videos from around the world are treasured for their spirit of global…
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News Exclusive: ADL chief compares student protesters to ISIS and al-Qaeda in address to Republican officials
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News A Jewish farmer drove 600 miles to rescue a century-old synagogue. Now he’s building a new one in a cornfield.
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Opinion Pete Hegseth is targeting a Jewish American hero — who’s next?
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Opinion The two things I fear most after the horrifying attack on Jews in Boulder
In Case You Missed It
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Film & TV In unheard recordings, Andy Kaufman emerges — a kinder, gentler soul than you may expect, or hope to see
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Opinion As fires burn in L.A., has Trump found his Reichstag fire moment?
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Film & TV In Jerusalem, everything is political — even the stone architects used to design the city
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Fast Forward Zohran Mamdani: Even if I wanted to go to Israel as NYC mayor, Israel probably wouldn’t let me
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