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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Books
Discovering Louisa May Alcott’s Jewish history on Portuguese tour
Louisa May Alcott was often told as a child that her dark hair and dark eyes came from her Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who had similar coloring, had learned this from her father, Joseph May, a late 18th-century Boston businessman whose Portuguese Jewish ancestors immigrated to Sussex, England, just before 1500….
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Why Susan Choi, National Book Award-Winner, Doesn’t Write About Her Jewish Background
NEW YORK (JTA) — On the day she found out she was being considered for the National Book Awards, Susan Choi was swimming laps at her gym, trying to busy herself. “Early in my career I just learned to close my ears to awards season,” she said. “I think it’s distracting and really stressful.” When…
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January 13-14: Miami, FL: Jodi at the Miami Jewish Film Festival
Don’t miss this year’s Miami Jewish Film Festival, running from January 9-23 in the Sunshine State. Forward editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren will get in on the action, interviewing Dani Merkin, the director of the documentary, “Aulcie” which continues the story of his award-winning film, “On the Map,” on Monday, January 13. Before the world-premier event, at…
The Latest
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Taffy Brodesser-Akner: The Internet Breaker
For Brodesser-Akner, 44, a child of divorce who grew up in Orthodox Brooklyn, the very act of reading popular novels was subversive. Now Brodesser-Akner, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, has penned a gloriously racy literary one filled with New York Jewish characters surely based on those in her actual life. Yet…
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Forward 50 | Adam Schiff: Impeacher-in-Chief (No. 1)
Until the Trump era, Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, was a respected specialist in intelligence and foreign affairs, and frequent journalistic source, but not a household name nationally. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi handed Schiff, 59, the baton to conduct the impeachment inquiry as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, that all changed. Schiff was…
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Zach Barack: Hollywood’s new hero
Just a few years ago, Zach Barack didn’t think he would ever tell anyone he was transgender. Now he’s living his truth in the most high-profile way possible after appearing in this year’s billion dollar-grossing blockbuster “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” where he became the first out trans actor to have a speaking role in a…
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MaNishtana: Orthodox Polymath
MaNishtana (aka Rabbi Shais Rishon), 37, is a playwright, a rabbi, a commentator and — with his roman a clef “Ariel Samson: Freelance Rabbi” (2018) — a novelist, He is also a deft and acerbic observer of the intersections of race and faith, shining a spotlight on prejudice and ignorance faced by Jews of color….
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Forward 50 | Eli Cohen: The rabbi trying to heal Crown Heights
Crown Heights, with its fraught history of black-Jewish tensions that erupted in riots 30 years ago, has this year seen a spike in violent attacks against the visibly Orthodox. Starting this summer, Rabbi Eli Cohen, executive director of the neighborhood’s Jewish community council, teamed up with a prominent black activist, Geoffrey Davis, to meet with…
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Carly Pildis: Zionist Feminist Activist
Carly Pildis, 34, has for several years been a forceful writer on Twitter and in the Jewish media (including Opinion articles in the Forward), addressing anti-Semitism on the left and right, and fighting for progressive Jews who don’t want to hide their support for Israel’s existence. In 2019, as controversies about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism raged,…
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Forward 50 | Chaya Porus Palevsky: Lithuanian partisan hero
On display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s new Auschwitz exhibit is a hand-embroidered floral blouse Chaya Palevsky made for her older sister Rachel Porus, a nurse, who kept many people alive in the Švenčionys ghetto. When the family was put on a train, bound, they believed, for Kaunas, Chaya made a split-second decision to…
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Forward 50 | Adam Berman: The urban farmer
Adam Berman made made his first foray into community organizing as a teenager, by starting an environmental club at school. Years later, while directing a Jewish retreat center in Connecticut, he started a program around green living and called it Adamah, the Hebrew word for “earth.” In 2010, he moved to Berkeley and opened Urban…
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Music Remembering Ozzy Osbourne’s Jewish vow renewal
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