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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Q&Archives: Telling old stories in new ways with Chana Pollack
This piece originally appeared on the Urban Archivist. Newspaper collections are not always the most impartial historical documents, but they provide a unique account of past events, both important and mundane, as primary resources. Since the vast majority of our partners’ collections are architecturally-focused, the two documentary-style newspaper collections that are available on our platform…
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‘Unorthodox’ could use some Hasidic sex lessons — and a few interior decorating tips too
Where does one start with “Unorthodox?” With the fake shtreimels which would hardly satisfy a 9-year old Hasidic boy dressing up for Purim? With the grating accents one would struggle to place west of the Vistula, if not the Volga? The home furnishings that may have been the deal during the Weimar years or Eisenhower’s…
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The oldest customer at Zabar’s lox counter — the tale of the 105-year-old man
Zabar’s is a slice of life. People scurry from room to room, section to section, walking, looking, seeing, listening, deciding, talking, thinking, tasting. Big people, little people, fat, skinny, tall, short, young and old. They’re all here. I’m watching them. Some of them are watching me. There are as many stories here as there are…
The Latest
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Everything you need to know about Anne Frank
Editor’s note: This article, originally published on July 9, 2019, has been republished in honor of the anniversary of the first publication of Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” on June 25, 1947. Anne Frank: You know her name, but do you know her story? Frank has become such a universal political and cultural…
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Roseanne Barr returns with a new Trump conspiracy theory
It feels like a century has passed since Roseanne Barr blamed a racist Twitter tirade on Ambien. Now, the comedian is back to send an altogether different — if no less puzzling — message about the leader of the free world. In a video posted to Twitter, Barr, from her home, launched into a one-minute…
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Absolutely every anti-Semitic thing Mel Gibson has ever said
That we know of
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‘The Politician,’ season two: A voice of a generation without a voice of his own
Season two of Netflix’s “The Politician” belongs, like a Ralph Lauren cologne ad or a Nancy Meyers film, to the culturally confused yet well-worn aesthetic of WASPy Jewishness. And somehow, even after all the decades of Jews having country clubs and garden parties of their own, it still feels transgressive. As Payton Hobart (Ben Platt),…
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Film & TV ‘I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if I wasn’t a Jew’ — Tamar Manasseh’s brave journey
Tamar Manasseh, the mother of two teenagers, remembers hearing about another young mom who had been shot and killed while attempting to break up a fight in broad daylight. “The newscasters said ‘She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ Manasseh, 41, told me over the phone from her home on Chicago’s south…
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St. Louis was named after an anti-Semitic crusader. Should its name be changed?
Some time after King Louis IX returned to France from his first Crusade in 1254, an anonymous French Jew wrote a letter to the king, who would become the only French monarch to ever be canonized in the Catholic Church. The letter, which was never sent, outlined the painful impact of a series of official…
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To Bruce Springsteen, the Jewish writer of ‘Strange Fruit’ was the ‘Bob Dylan of his time’
To quote the bard Adam Sandler, “Bruce Springsteen’s isn’t Jewish, but my mother thinks he is.” When the Boss sat down with New York Times columnist (and debatable Jew) David Brooks to assemble a playlist for this moment of racial justice protests and social distancing, he picked two songs that were written by an oft-forgotten…
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With ‘oven dodger’ comments coming home to roost, Mel Gibson runs afowl of ‘Chicken Run 2’
Mel Gibson’s clay chicken is cooked and no longer kosher. The actor and filmmaker, who made news this week for allegedly calling actress Winona Ryder an “oven dodger” in 1995, will not be asked reprise his role of Rocky in the sequel to Aardman Animation’s “Chicken Run” two sources with knowledge of the film told…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
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Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
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