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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Remembering Regis Philbin’s ‘Bonkos’ time on ‘Seinfeld’
“I will never forget that silence, nor will I ever get over it,” Regis Philbin wrote in his 2011 memoir “How I Got This Way.” The moment, as Philbin describes it, was gutting. And to think it was all because of a show about nothing. Philbin, a talk show staple who began his on-camera career…
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In ‘Gone With the Wind,’ a complicated Jewish subtext
Editor’s note: Olivia de Havilland, the last surviving star of “Gone with the Wind” died July 26, 2020 at the age of 104. In the film, she played Melanie Hamilton, the prototypical Southern belle sister-in-law of Scarletther closest friend. In honor of Ms. de Havilland’s long career in entertainment, we’re republishing a piece from earlier…
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On Bugs Bunny’s 80th birthday, how Jewish is that wascally wabbit anyway?
As we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the release of “A Wild Hare,” the first animated short starring Bugs Bunny, the question arises: How Jewish was the sassy, anti-authoritarian rabbit? Since 1940, Jewish audiences have taken Bugs to their heart for his anarchic energy in lightning-fast short films of concentrated intensity and visual quality, especially…
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On Mick Jagger’s 77th birthday, the secret Jewish history of the Rolling Stones
In 2015, when The Rolling Stones took the stage at HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv, that event represented more than just the world’s greatest and longest-running rock band’s first concert in Israel. It also marked one small victory in the war against a rock ’n’ roll boycott of Israel being waged by some English rockers, mostly…
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As Frog and Toad turn 50, a look at their most mortifying story
I recall with distinct mortification Toad’s striped, singlet bathing suit. Like so many early readers, I was in the cubbyholed realm of an elementary school classroom when I first encountered Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” books, the first of which was released 50 years ago this August. Their whimsical bucolic watercolors struck me then (or…
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What’s the best New York Jewish book of all time?
Literary cities are many, but there’s only one New York. Now, philanthropists Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson are acknowledging that fact with a new award for books set in or about the Big Apple, which will come complete with a $50,000 prize. The news of the Gotham Book Prize arrives at a time when the…
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Release of Wes Anderson’s ‘most Jewish film’ delayed indefinitely
It looks like fans will have to wait a little longer for the movie that critics — a.k.a. us — have dubbed Wes Anderson’s “most Jewish film to date.” Yes, the release date of the director’s 10th film, “The French Dispatch,” a capital-W Whimsical foray into the fictional French city of “Ennui-sur-Blasé,” has been postponed yet again….
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Q & A: A Hebrew typographer on reading between a prayer book’s lines
In the alternate pandemic reality of my daydreams, I don’t spend my afterwork hours sanitizing groceries and watching more TV than ever before. Rather, I’m raising chickens outside my charming farmhouse, harvesting my own produce and cancelling my streaming subscriptions to focus on projects of personal and societal improvement. No one is actually living like…
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In Shanghai, a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi Europe
75 years ago, American troops entered Shanghai to help liberate the city from the Japanese. Surprised upon being told there was a Jewish ghetto in the city, they prepared for the worst. Like the rest of the world, they had watched the ghastly scenes of allied liberators stumbling upon concentration camps and ghettos in Europe…
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Ukrainian hostage situation ends after president plugs Joaquin Phoenix film
So, who had “gunman releases 13 hostages after the Ukrainian president agrees to endorse an obscure 2005 documentary narrated by Joaquin Phoenix” on their 2020 bingo card? If you did, congrats. Yesterday morning in Lutsk, a city in Western Ukraine, a 44-year-old man named Maksym Kryvosh fired an automatic weapon before entering a bus and…
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This ultra-Orthodox man is running for president — or is he?
Bored by Biden? Turned off by Trump? Confused by Kanye? Meet Yoely, who is running for president on the Heimishe Party ticket. Heimeshe is Yiddish for wholesome, and a word many Hasidim use to describe themselves and their culture. Yoely – no last name, like Adele and Beyoncé — explains in an Instagram video: “High-mish…
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