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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For Larry Kramer, AIDS was the second Holocaust
For people of their time, appreciating a biblical prophet of doom such as Jeremiah or the Roman satirist Juvenal depended on whether things were really seen as dire. The 1985 play “The Normal Heart” by Larry Kramer, who died on May 27 at age the age of 84, combines Jeremiah and Juvenal in ways that…
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Why Russia’s most popular cartoon is strangely relevant now
I waited a long time — though not as long as I’d planned — before I let my daughter watch any sort of television; when I did, I knew her first cartoon had to be “Ny Pogodi,” the strange Roadrunner-esque cartoon that I and so many millions of Russian children grew up on in the…
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The lie wasn’t ignorance; it was freedom
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Laine Schlezinger, who attends 11th grade at Burlingame High School in Burlingame, CA. You can find more work from our young writers here I live in the Bay Area, a place we call…
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Did pop star Doja Cat moderate ‘alt-right’ chatrooms?
Day to night to morning, it’s hard to keep with Doja Cat’s many cancellations in the moment. The artist’s rise from profoundly weird SoundCloud novelty rapper to Billboard chart topper was never without its controversy. Now there’s another one, this time involving alt-right vernacular and racist chatrooms. The 24-year-old “Say So” singer, whose real name…
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Larry Kramer, AIDS crusader and playwright, dies at 84
Larry Kramer, the firebrand playwright who ignited bold protests over the government’s inaction to the AIDS crisis, died Wednesday morning of pneumonia. Kramer, who was H.I.V. positive and battled poor health for years, was 84. Kramer was all but ousted from the AIDS activism group Gay Men’s Health Crisis for his militancy in 1982. He…
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We took pity on Arkansas
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Nora Wyrtzen, a fifteen-year-old student from New Haven, Conn. You can find more work from our young writers here. Spring, and pale pink cherry blossoms kissed the earth with gossamer petals; lamenting their…
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The unexpected joys of watching ‘Uncut Gems’ on Netflix
I first met Howard Ratner at a sold-out afternoon showing at the Lincoln Square AMC — back when going to the movies was a thing. The theater was a vivid cross-section of New York life — old gay couples, Modern Orthodox college kids in kippot, young black and Latinx urban professionals. By pinning down Adam…
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This is the only cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” we need right now
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” began its life, in 1984’s “Various Positions,” as a profoundly weird song with gospel choir accompaniment, a painfully-of-its-era drum machine and a stentorian and unemotive delivery from the poet himself. But you don’t really care for that music, do you? For many, the template for all covers of Cohen’s initially unremarked ballad…
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Freedom for me is freedom from you — a poem
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Victoria Y.T. Nealey, a 13-year-old student at the Brandeis School of San Francisco. You can find more work from our young writers here WHAT IT MEANS TO BE FREE you you are the…
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Freedom is fighting for change
On a sunny Saturday in September 2018, I put on some makeup, changed into the new outfit I’d bought, and headed into New York City with my friends to go to the Global Citizen music festival. We’d been waiting for the festival for weeks, a chance to celebrate our first month of 10th grade with…
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From Minsk to America, freedom remains elusive
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Josh Elkin, a 16-year-old student from the High School of Health Sciences in Wales, Wisconsin. You can find more work from our young writers here. In 1980, a Jewish couple in Minsk makes…
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