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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Film & TV
What to watch after ‘Unorthodox’
It’s been a month and we’re still talking about “Unorthodox.” Well, “talking” may be too tame a word. Debating, analyzing, nitpicking and making valid, important points about the series’ merits and potential harms. And while there’s much that remains to be said about the Netflix show (several million Jews, who knows how many opinions), there…
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Q&A: Booker Prize-winning translator Jessica Cohen on mental health and the IDF
For most Israelis, military service is as certain as death and taxes. But not everyone thrives in the army. Yair Assulin’s 2011 novel, “The Drive,” tracks an unnamed narrator’s inner monologue as he and his father travel to an army psychiatrist seeking a transfer. The young man, from a religious family, feels stifled and suicidal…
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You don’t know what freedom is until it’s gone
Editor’s Note: The Forward’s Youth Writing Contest is asking middle and high school students to submit essays, short stories and poems on the topic “What It Means To Be Free.” We’re still accepting entries at [email protected] — you can find the entry guidelines here.The deadline is Friday, May 1. Today, we’re proud to publish this…
The Latest
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The Forward investigates: Is Doron from ‘Fauda’ hot?
We need to talk about Doron’s body count. Not the many, many terrorists the antihero of “Fauda,” played with bracing intensity by the former special forces soldier Lior Raz, has dispatched over three seasons. I’m talking about Doron’s record with women. Against walls and kitchen counters, and in the war room within earshot of his…
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“Unorthodox” is a dangerous, misleading fairy tale of transitioning from the secular world
Before I left the Satmar Hasidic community in Kiryas Joel, I believed my journey would be similar to that of Esty in the Netflix miniseries “Unorthodox.” Like Esty, who is immediately welcomed into a circle of diverse and good looking Berlin musicians, I’d be easily embraced into the secular social milieu. Like Esty, who gets…
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Let’s talk about Unorthodox
The conversation on the Netflix series “Unorthodox” has been non-stop, even outside the Jewish community. Inside it, the discussion has been even more fiery, as the show is as controversial as it is popular; many take issue with the way it portrays the Jewish community, particularly its accuracies and inaccuracies regarding its portrayal of women…
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Israeli Independence Day goes virtual with ‘IsraPalooza’
Israeli Independence Day usually finds the team behind the podcast “Israel Story” trekking to venues throughout the United States with dancers, musicians and storytellers to perform a live version of their show. This Yom Ha’atzmaut, coronavirus has put a damper on traveling, but the show is making up for this setback by hosting an all-day,…
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In Stephen Sondheim’s birthday concert, notes of a better, more human Broadway
Streaming live on YouTube, the concert started late, then stopped abruptly, started, stopped, then abruptly disappeared. All in all, the star-studded, highly hyped “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration” finally got rolling an hour and 15 minutes after it was supposed to. In the meantime, would-be viewers anxious to watch Broadway…
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With COVID-19 raging in New York, a klezmer-tinged fanfare for the essential worker
From his rooftop on the Lower East Side, Grammy-winning composer and trumpeter Frank London has been hearing the nightly 7:00 PM calls of gratitude for New York City’s healthcare, food service and transit personnel working through the coronavirus pandemic. Now, he’s enriching the ritual by composing a fanfare for the essential worker for winds, strings…
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From Boccaccio and Edgar Allan Poe, eerie portents of coronavirus
The deadly plague arrived in the noble city of Florence, Italy. It had begun in the East, where it deprived countless beings of their lives before it headed for the West, spreading ever greater misery as it moved relentlessly from place to place. Against it all human wisdom and foresight were useless. Numerous instructions were…
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The Joan of Arc of Irish sex — and her Jewish acolytes
In mid-April, The Irish Times alerted its readership to an “astonishing hatchet job” of a national icon, the novelist Edna O’Brien. The offending article, a condescending and nit-picking profile, had appeared some months before in The New Yorker, but took some time for its venom to percolate as far as Europe. O’Brien, who will be…
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