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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What Trump (and Masha Gessen) can teach us about autocracy
Surviving Autocracy By Masha Gessen Riverhead Books, 270 pages, $26 Everything seems to move more quickly these days, including publishing. The epilogue of Masha Gessen’s “Surviving Autocracy,” a polemic urging resistance to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian inclinations, is dated April 2020. It’s topical enough to reference both the COVID-19 crisis and the administration’s “disastrous” response….
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Trump’s church photo has no American precedent. Does it have one in fascism?
It was the photo op that transfixed the nation. Early Monday evening, President Trump, accompanied by a small cadre of staff and press, marched from the White House through Lafayette Square to St. John’s Episcopal church, where every president since James Madison has attended services. He had just given a speech threatening to use the…
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Why I’ll always be grateful to Bruce Jay Friedman
A few years ago I called Bruce Jay Friedman to thank him for helping give shape to my life. He quickly brushed aside my thanks, and a little less quickly declined my invitation for lunch. He’d been ailing for a while, and wasn’t getting out of his apartment much. But he was firm about continuing…
The Latest
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A 90-year-old Minneapolis artist lost it all in a protest fire — he’s ready to start over
On May 30, Aribert Munzner’s art studio in South Minneapolis caught fire and was doused with 1,000 gallons of water. Protesters responding to the death of George Floyd burned a bar across the street and the wind picked up embers that landed on the Civil War-era Ivy Arts Building’s wooden roof. The fire department quickly…
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In ‘Chained’ a power-mad cop loses control of his family
Love can be tough, and tougher still to watch. In Yaron Shani’s “Chained,” we witness, from suffocating angles, how one man’s intense brand of caring and need for control destroys his world. The film, which is streaming online as part of the Manhattan JCC’s virtual Israel Film Center Festival June 10 and 11, is the…
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How about a second season of ‘Unorthodox’ to cure the ills of the first?
The response to the Netflix hit show “Unorthodox” has been huge. Breaking expectations and hitting the Netflix top ten list in such unlikely locations as Saudi Arabia, the show has been the entry point for many viewers to learn about the Hasidic community. However, as the show has become the de facto spokesperson for Judaism,…
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WATCH NOW July 8: An exit interview with Amb. Dani Dayan
Watch the recording here. Ambassador Dayan is heading home after four years as Israel’s Consul General in the New York area. What has he learned about American Jewry and our relationship with the Jewish state? How has the experience changed his understanding of U.S. politics — and Israel’s? Join Jodi Rudoren and Andrew Silow-Carroll, editors-in-chief…
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Books Is there any good time to publish a book during a pandemic?
“Timing is everything.” Larry Cohler-Esses wrote that line in 1995 in a Forward news story about my book contract with Simon and Schuster. I was the American Jewish Committee’s expert on antisemitism at the time. I had written a report on the militia movement ten days before the Oklahoma City bombing predicting attacks on government…
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Why Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ is the perfect poem for these times
In this spring of fear and torment, COVID Spring, a spring when we mourn our dead, Jews are saying Kaddish too many times. When I grew up in a casually Jewish household we lit yahrzeit candles, and nothing focused my thoughts on the passing of all things like the familiar melody of Kaddish, As I…
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WATCH NOW June 30: A Jewish conversation for Pride Month: How far we’ve come, and what happens next?
Watch here. Fifty years after the first Pride march, this year’s celebration is different. Social-distancing has canceled many parades, and celebrations are mainly online. The Supreme Court just ruled that LGBTQ people are protected from employment discrimination. And the issue of inclusion has perhaps never been a higher priority in Jewish circles. On June’s last…
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Should we really keep comparing Trump to Hitler?
Yesterday, a few hundred feet from the White House Rose Garden, Donald Trump’s Justice Department stage-managed a show of force against his own citizens. Today, the president is being compared to Adolf Hitler — again. Before curfew went into effect at 7 p.m. on Monday, peaceful protesters at Lafayette Square were met with police in…
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