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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Hal Willner, 64: The strangest, most beloved man in show business
Hal Willner might have been the most willfully strange person in show business. The music producer, who died on Monday at age 64 of complications of coronavirus, had a magic touch. He could get anyone to do anything: Tom Waits to sing an unrecognizable, railroad-rough version of “Heigh Ho” from Disney’s “Snow White”; R &…
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How DeMille made his ‘Ten Commandments’ Jewish again
To understand Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” -– both the 1923 silent version and the better-known 1956 film starring Charlton Heston as Moses — one must look to history. Not 3,000 years back in history, when Moses climbed Sinai to receive the law, but to the few years before the movies were made. Each…
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WATCH: Carole King and the cast of ‘Beautiful’ sing ‘You’ve Got a Friend’
Carole King and a crew of her onstage doppelgangers have given us a special quarantine gift. In a new video, which premiered April 7 on CBS This Morning, cast and musicians from numerous productions of “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” serenaded at-home listeners with a lushly-orchestrated rendition of King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” — all…
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What’s up with the anti-Semitic imagery in British cartoons this week?
Two political cartoons published this week in the UK have shown that anti-Semitic imagery is alive and well in the British imagination. Christian Adams’s drawing for the Evening Standard (the newspaper edited by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osbourne) depicts the new Labour Party Leader, Sir Keir Starmer, welcoming back former Labour leader,…
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Daily distraction: Make this Passover a celebration
Welcome to your daily distraction, our recommendations for ways to stay engaged and entertained while we socially distance ourselves to combat the novel coronavirus outbreak. You can find our past recommendations here; many of the opportunities we’ve highlighted are ongoing. Happy Passover. For many of us, it’s going to be a weird one. As we’ve…
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How ‘A Rugrats Passover’ became an iconic holiday special
In 1995, Nickelodeon's popular cartoon series debuted its most Jewish episode
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The unkindest cut: Last call for a Zabar’s lox slicer
It was March 13. The pandemic was in its early stages. No one knew what was yet to come. I was three quarters through the slice when my supervisor came behind the counter. I stopped slicing and looked up at him. “I don’t think I want you here next Thursday, Len.” he said. “We’ll talk…
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Reading Wordsworth in quarantine
At the tail end of my first year out of college, my then-boyfriend and I had a serious conversation about where we wanted to move. We’d stayed in St. Louis after graduating, but it was time to go. I wanted New York. He wanted San Francisco. We sat face-to-face on my bed, in my sweet…
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6 backgrounds to use for your Zoom Seder — and more!
Why is this Passover different from all other Passovers? Only a simple child would ask such a question, but one answer is that so many of us far from home will be connecting with family via Zoom. But, while social distancing Seders may be a sad symptom of the times, they do come with at…
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A seder in Siberia
Read this story in Yiddish It was the only time in my life when everyone at the Passover table was thinking only about the Haggadah, not the matzo balls — perhaps because there wasn’t a whiff of a matzo ball to be found. That year in Siberia, spring arrived a few weeks earlier than expected….
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Passover in the time of the plague
My daughter just saw her first rainbow. We stood between the sun and the drizzle and I pronounced the words of the blessing: “Blessed are You, Lord our G-d, King of the universe, who remembers the covenant, and is faithful to His covenant, and keeps His promise.” I’d always been puzzled by the language —…
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