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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To be free is to love
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Rachel Ezrielev, a 13-year-old student from Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring, MD. You can find more work from our young writers here As they punched me, slamming me against a wall and…
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Is Netflix’s Jeffrey Epstein doc too slick for its own good?
When Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell in August, 2019, there were widespread rumors from across the political spectrum that he was, in fact, murdered by his powerful acquaintances. It seemed unbelievable that the accused sex trafficker, just released from suicide watch following an earlier attempt to take his own life,…
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‘Hamilton’ director set for new film of ‘Fiddler’
Miracle of miracles, we’re getting another film adaptation of “Fiddler on the Roof.” And this time, the director’s Jewish. Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton” is set to helm the new adaptation of Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock’s classic musical, Deadline reports, with a script by Kail’s former collaborator, Tony-winner Steven Levenson (“Dear Evan…
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How Rush rescued me in quarantine — twice
As these days of self-quarantine warp and fold my sense of time, I’ve increasingly found my mind drifting back forty years, to the last time I was floating in a similar state of semi-housebound limbo. I’d moved to Chicago from Los Angeles with my mom and sister at the end of 1979. I had been…
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For Larry Kramer, AIDS was the second Holocaust
For people of their time, appreciating a biblical prophet of doom such as Jeremiah or the Roman satirist Juvenal depended on whether things were really seen as dire. The 1985 play “The Normal Heart” by Larry Kramer, who died on May 27 at age the age of 84, combines Jeremiah and Juvenal in ways that…
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Why Russia’s most popular cartoon is strangely relevant now
I waited a long time — though not as long as I’d planned — before I let my daughter watch any sort of television; when I did, I knew her first cartoon had to be “Ny Pogodi,” the strange Roadrunner-esque cartoon that I and so many millions of Russian children grew up on in the…
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The lie wasn’t ignorance; it was freedom
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Laine Schlezinger, who attends 11th grade at Burlingame High School in Burlingame, CA. You can find more work from our young writers here I live in the Bay Area, a place we call…
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Did pop star Doja Cat moderate ‘alt-right’ chatrooms?
Day to night to morning, it’s hard to keep with Doja Cat’s many cancellations in the moment. The artist’s rise from profoundly weird SoundCloud novelty rapper to Billboard chart topper was never without its controversy. Now there’s another one, this time involving alt-right vernacular and racist chatrooms. The 24-year-old “Say So” singer, whose real name…
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Larry Kramer, AIDS crusader and playwright, dies at 84
Larry Kramer, the firebrand playwright who ignited bold protests over the government’s inaction to the AIDS crisis, died Wednesday morning of pneumonia. Kramer, who was H.I.V. positive and battled poor health for years, was 84. Kramer was all but ousted from the AIDS activism group Gay Men’s Health Crisis for his militancy in 1982. He…
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We took pity on Arkansas
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Nora Wyrtzen, a fifteen-year-old student from New Haven, Conn. You can find more work from our young writers here. Spring, and pale pink cherry blossoms kissed the earth with gossamer petals; lamenting their…
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The unexpected joys of watching ‘Uncut Gems’ on Netflix
I first met Howard Ratner at a sold-out afternoon showing at the Lincoln Square AMC — back when going to the movies was a thing. The theater was a vivid cross-section of New York life — old gay couples, Modern Orthodox college kids in kippot, young black and Latinx urban professionals. By pinning down Adam…
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