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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Can eyewitness footage from the West Bank change minds about the occupation? Not hers
The camera phone made everyone a documentarian. For the disenfranchised, this transformation was born of urgency. Armed with nothing more than a basic smartphone, people all over the world now have the means to command their own narratives of oppression — their own lived experience — and share them directly with millions. Recently, in America,…
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The secret Jewish history of Elvis Costello
The first words Elvis Costello sings on his new album, “Hey Clockface” (Concord Records), are “I got no religion, I got no philosophy.” While the 66-year-old self-described “lapsed Catholic” might not adhere to any doctrine or creed, he has — like his father before him — enjoyed a storied career collaborating with Jewish artists. And…
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Books Yiddish culture barely touched upon in ‘The New Jewish Canon’
Read this article in Yiddish What were the most important Jewish texts of the last 40 years? What did the Jewish opinion-makers have to say about the most important issues of Jewish survival? Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire Sufrin attempt to answer these questions in a collection of 70 selected documents called “The New Jewish Canon:…
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Can a drama about the Yom Kippur War heal a divided Israel?
On Yom Kippur 1973, a 7-year-old Yaron Zilberman was roused not by shofar calls, but air raid sirens. “I got confused,” said Zilberman, who believed the clamor had something to do with the holiday. “Of course you don’t have any sirens on Yom Kippur — for Veterans Day or Yom HaZikaron you’d commemorate all the…
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WATCH NOW: January 26: The Classic Israeli Dessert You Never Heard Of
Watch the recording here. To kick off the Jewish Arts Collaborative (JArts) “Taste of Israel Restaurant Week,” watch Forverts Editor Rukhl Schaechter as she makes a classic Israeli dessert: tea biscuit cake, or ugat biskvitim (עוגת ביסקויטים) as it’s known in Hebrew. It’s easy to make and you don’t even need an oven! The baking…
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As we mourn Alex Trebek, we honor the Jewish history of ‘Jeopardy’
While we mourn longtime “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek, who died on Nov. 8 at age 80, we also pause to honor the game show’s admirably constant quotient of Yiddishkeit. Since 1990, Billy Wisse has worked for “Jeopardy!” as writer and editorial producer, among other responsibilities. Son of Ruth R. Wisse and professor emerita of Yiddish…
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That time my father Norman Mailer introduced me to Norman Mailer the celebrity
At the end of the summer of 1970, I got back from Europe and went over to see Dad. While I was there, with a sheepish grin he informed me Carol, his fifth wife, was pregnant. I would soon have another sibling, a seventh Mailer child. I was stunned. Not that I didn’t like Carol….
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Trump aspired to be a master propagandist. This week, he failed.
President Trump’s Twitter feed looks different these days. It’s not because Trump’s tweets, in the wake of his loss in the presidential race to former Vice President Joe Biden, are rife with disinformation about the integrity of the American electoral process. That was the case even long before election results began rolling in. It’s because…
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6 films that predicted the 2020 Election
There is every reason for us to fear the movies that will inevitably be made about the 2020 election. The early crop of Trump entertainment, from the bloated, neoliberal hagiography of “The Comey Rule” to whatever the hell this is does not exactly set a high bar in cinematic history. At a time like this…
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Ari Melber quotes Drake as we look away in horror
As with any historic election, many of us are now taking stock of where we are, or will be, when the final vote is counted. (Probably, like most of the country, we’ll be at home.) But long after Trump or Biden hits the magic number of 270, I will still be reeling from a less…
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As popularity of Yiddish skyrockets, Knesset launches Yiddish initiative in Israel
Read this article in Yiddish This week, a lobby was launched in the Knesset, urging the government to take responsibility for preserving Yiddish as a national language, and ultimately, for Israel to become the world center for Yiddish activity. A Knesset lobby is a group of Knesset members who want to enlist support for individuals…
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