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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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…
The Latest
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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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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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