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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‘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…
The Latest
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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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These filmmakers are putting Asian-American Jews on camera. Here’s what they want you to know
It’s a precept you’ve probably heard, no matter what form your Jewish education took: “You shall not oppress the stranger, because you know what it’s like to be strangers in the land of Egypt.” Found in the Torah portion mishpatim, that sentence is often cited as a command for compassion rooted in Jewish values. But…
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Netanyahu’s embrace of ‘South Park’ proves the Michael Che dustup was political
There’s a lot going on in the new “South Park” special, but only a few seconds that seem to matter to Benjamin Netanyahu. On Thursday, the prime minister tweeted a clip from the episode that showed a passenger plane decked out with Magen Davids appearing in a burst of spangly sky diamonds. “It’s Air Israel…
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Groucho Barx and Matzah Ball: Why do Jewish pets have Jewish names?
In early lockdown, my friend Jess got a pandemic puppy. She told me she was considering naming him Knish. I suggested Babka, and, as though it was an unspoken truth that the new puppy must be named after a Jewish food, we ran through every example we could think of. Latke was too obvious, and…
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One year under lockdown — celebrating the anniversary from hell
March 11 isn’t a date to be commemorated with champagne or flowers. Nobody will celebrate the day in 2020 when the virus came to America. The traditional gift for a first anniversary is paper. This year’s favorites will likely be the stimulus check or a COVID Vaccination Record Card. Like so many Americans, I’ve been…
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Returning to Poland, chasing ghosts and a lost painting
“Still Life in Lodz,” a new documentary by Polish-Jewish director Slawomir Grunberg, centers on a Jewish woman’s return to her childhood home in Lodz, Poland, She, Lilka Elbaum, and her family were forced to flee no, not during the Holocaust, but in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War and a spike in Polish…
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Why is this Haggadah different from all others? Hitler.
This particular Haggadah, different from all others, was bound to raise eyebrows — if not create a furor. We don’t know much about its origins, but here’s what we do: It was written by a Jew in Rabat, Morocco, sometime after the start of Operation Torch, the 1942 Allied invasion that spelled victory against the…
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