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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Playwright David Adjmi takes on a new role: Memoirist
On a sweltering day in New York, and a milder one in Los Angeles, David Adjmi moved our Facetime conversation up to his terrace and showed me the view: trees and white facades melting into the greenery of the Hollywood Hills. “Can you see it?” Adjmi asked. “Isn’t that pretty? This is why I like…
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Mr. Kushner, your privilege is showing
Jared Kushner dunking on NBA players for being wealthy and entitled is about as rich as he is. In a morning interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Kushner was asked for the White House’s take on plans by NBA players to boycott playoff games in protest over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis….
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Bill and Ted’s creators on ‘Face the Music’ and tikkun olam
The world changed in 1991. At the San Dimas Battle of the Bands, William S. Preston, Esq. and Theodore Logan, backed by Death on upright bass, two aliens on bongos and robot back-up-dancer doppelgangers united the world in song and changed the course of history forever. Or so we thought. For Ed Solomon and Chris…
The Latest
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Arnold Spielberg — engineering pioneer, father of Steven — dies at 103
Arnold Meyer Spielberg, who died on August 25 at age 103, was more than just the father of celebrated film director Steven Spielberg. Born in Cincinnati to a family of Ukrainian Jewish origin, Arnold Spielberg grew up to be an electrical engineer of uncommon invention and productivity. He developed research that would make the personal…
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Is suburbia the American dream — or its worst nightmare?
On the very first page of “The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs,” author Jason Diamond describes feeling ambivalent about admitting you’re from the suburbs. “If you’re from Long Island … you’ll tell anyone who asks you’re from New York,” he writes, to which I reply, “Guilty as charged.” Diamond himself has always claimed Chicago…
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Amar’e Stoudemire completes his conversion to Judaism
The Jews can always use a good power forward on our team. We now have a great one. Realizing a years-long process of study and engagement with Judaism, Amar’e Stoudemire, the former NBA player now dribbling for Maccabi Tel Aviv, made his final full-court press into the faith on August 26, 2020. Stoudemire announced the…
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I wrote speeches for a fictional president; no one could have imagined Donald Trump
Long before Fox became a right-wing propaganda machine, I crafted speeches for an Oval Office occupant on their comedy series, “Mr. President,” which starred George C. Scott and Madeline Kahn. My husband Martin and I were in the writers’ room in 1987, several years after politics and performing had intersected with the election of former…
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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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