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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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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Suffrage comes with obligations. Voting is only the first.
Women have had the right to vote in the United States for 100 years. We should celebrate that, but our understanding of what exactly this right entails remains superficial. Many think that the right to vote is in itself sufficient: If they have in fact voted, they think, they have exercised this right and fulfilled…
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Why I won’t celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment
Mention to me that you’re celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment, and you might notice a slight cringe. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve just finished a book about the history of Black women and the vote, so I am as interested as anyone in this anniversary and its significance to the nation’s past. But…
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The Eastern European Jewish immigrant who saved suffrage
On August 8, 1920, a freshman legislator from Tennessee, Joseph Hanover, was summoned to the elegant Hermitage Hotel in Nashville by Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. A friend and longtime ally of Susan B. Anthony, Catt had been pushing for women’s suffrage since the 1880s, and had assumed leadership…
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Why have Jewish suffragists been left out of history?
This year, leading up to the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, newspapers, podcasts, documentaries and museum exhibitions — indeed, three in the nation’s capital alone — have been filled with stories of the brave women who, for three-quarters of a century, fought for the vote. But Jewish women rarely appear in these…
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