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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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…
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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…
The Latest
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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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‘Batman Forever’ and Brat Pack director Joel Schumacher dies at 80
Joel Schumacher had style. His was an edgy, campy, critically divisive panache somehow both ahead of its time and regressive. It was the open-shirted vampire chic of “The Lost Boys” and the lamentable “Bat nipples” of “Batman & Robin.” The filmmaker, who died Monday at the age of 80 after a yearlong battle with cancer,…
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What John Bolton’s tell-all tells us
Vladimir Putin digs Bibi Netanyahu. Jared Kushner screens Netanyahu’s calls. Donald Trump thinks that Chinese concentration camps are the right move and would support an Israeli strike on Iran. These are some of the insights in John Bolton’s long-awaited memoir “The Room Where It Happened,” out today from Simon & Schuster. He’s not holding much…
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