Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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I have seen the future of America — in a pastrami sandwich in Queens
San Wei, which serves pastrami sandwiches along with churros and biang biang noodles, represents an immigrant's fulfillment of the American dream
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Famous Sholem Aleichem Statue Defaced With Swastikas In Ukraine
In 1905, the writer Sholem Aleichem fled his native Ukraine after witnessing a brutal pogrom in Kiev. In 1997, that city erected a monument to him. He eventually found his way to America, but he wrote of his homeland for the rest of his life. And this past weekend, unknown vandals painted bright red swastikas…
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Q & A: Is A Conspiracy Theory Responsible For This Year’s Shocking Nobel Prize In Literature?
The October announcement of Austrian novelist Peter Handke as the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature was greeted, by many, with confusion. Handke, apologist for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president who oversaw the Bosnian genocide? Handke, who spoke at Milosevic’s funeral and told critics of his decision to do so to “go to…
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The Forward: Our Vision, Mission, and Values
At the Forward, our Vision and Mission articulate the change we want to see in the world, and how we can help make it happen. Our Values describe the essential pieces of who we are and how we operate. After 120+ years spent serving the Jewish community, and with our new global reach and purely…
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Today In Corrections: Lt. Col Vindman Was Wounded By An IED, Not An IUD
Did you hear about how Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the decorated Jewish war hero, childhood refugee and damning witness in the Trump impeachment probe received his Purple Heart? For a moment in GQ magazine, the cause was depicted as quite a private matter, thank you very much. Every so often corrective italics at the end…
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Ben Lerner, Rachel Louise Snyder Round Out New York Times’s 10 Best Books Of 2019
Stories of escape, abduction, friendship, growth and crisis make up The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2019, announced November 22. The Times’s fiction picks include Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School,” the writer’s third novel. In it, Lerner, through the voices of several characters, evokes the Kansas of his Clinton-era late adolescence. The novel’s…
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At ADL Conference, Sacha Baron Cohen Breaks Character To Call Out Mark Zuckerberg
For the first time in his career, Sacha Baron Cohen delivered a speech out of character. The occasion was the Anti-Defamation League’s 2019 Leadership Conference, held November 21 at the Javits Center in New York. Baron Cohen, the recipient of the ADL’s International Leadership Award, came to the lectern with no shoulder-secured Speedo, no prosthetics…
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Is This The Most Prescient Novel Of 2019?
Last month, when I spoke to the author, screenwriter and film director Nicholas Meyer over at LitHub about his new novel “The Adventures of the Peculiar Protocols,” we spent some time talking about how unfortunately timely the book was. Both a chilling, cautionary tale and a rip-roaring yarn that sets Sherlock Holmes on the trail…
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The Most Dangerous Anti-Semitic Lie — The Return Of The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion
Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council, dropped a bombshell during her testimony in today’s impeachment hearings by likening the George Soros conspiracy theories “the new Elders of the Protocols of Zion.” Well, what are those Protocols? “A classic of anti-Semitic literature,” according to Encyclopedia Brittanica. The “classic” goes by…
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Climate Activist Apologizes For Holocaust Remarks After German Publisher Cancels His Book
Following the cancelation of the German edition of his book, the controversial British climate activist Roger Hallam has apologized for remarks that were criticized for making light of the Holocaust. In excerpts from an interview with German daily Der Zeit that appeared Wednesday, Hallam, a co-founder of the London-based climate group Extinction Rebellion — also…
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A Wiser — And Much Older — ’Fiddler On The Roof’
In a black box theater at New York University, Tevye’s teenage daughters, wearing long skirts, head scarves and modern shoes — the shtetl, but with Doc Martens and duck boots — sang the last notes of “Matchmaker.” The dress rehearsal looked like any other production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in every way but one:…
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Susan Choi, László Krasznahorkai Take Home National Book Awards
On November 20, the National Book Foundation feted six diverse winners for its 70th annual National Book Awards. Novelist Susan Choi, the daughter of a Korean father and a Russian-Jewish mother won the fiction prize for her fifth book, “Trust Exercise,” a narratively-inventive, #MeToo-informed story about a performing arts high school in the 1980s. The…
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