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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They were a kosher bakery success story — 80 years later, people are still trying to make a buck off their babka
The tale of Schick's Bakery is one of 20th-century ingenuity and 21st-century capitalism
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Roman Polanski Made A Film About The Dreyfus Affair. Will Anyone Distribute It?
Since 1978, director and convicted sex offender Roman Polanski has lived as a fugitive in Europe, where he has continued to make movies. But it seems that post #MeToo, securing distribution for Polanski’s films requires a degree of extreme discretion, even on the continent he calls home. On May 18, the first Saturday of the…
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I Edited The Forverts For 18 Years, But I Never Forgot My First Day
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. It’s often said that one’s first impressions are usually the strongest, although not necessarily the most precise. Although I experienced a number of memorable moments during my…
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Art National Museum Of American Jewish History CEO Resigns
Ivy L. Barsky, the chief executive of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, has resigned. She will leave the institution in June, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Barsky was named CEO in 2012, two years after the museum opened a new $150 million building. (The museum, founded in 1976, was historically housed in…
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Film & TV ‘Game Of Thrones’ Made Headlines For A Starbucks Cup. Were The Showrunners To Blame?
With “Game of Thrones” arriving at an unsatisfying end, fans have been quick to pin the blame on showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff. If the timing of the hit show’s eighth season felt rushed, the character beats unconvincing or the conclusion a bit confused, it makes sense that the pair, who wrote the final…
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How Four Women Told The World About The Nazis’ Medical Experiments
In January of 1943, four Polish political prisoners in Ravensbrück, a women-only Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany, wrote letters to their families. Inmates were allowed to write one letter per month, missives that the SS strictly censored. The four women escaped suspicion by banally describing life in the camps as pleasant. But in truth,…
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How Hulu’s ‘Catch-22’ Lost The Spirit Of Joseph Heller’s Masterpiece
Everything you need to know about the Hulu adaptation of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” comes down to a scream. In the opening moments of the new six-part miniseries, which debuted on May 17, Captain John Yossarian (Christopher Abbott) pads down a runway, naked as the day he was born, with blood caked on his face. Behind…
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Remembering Herman Wouk’s Bestselling Confidence And Modesty
In the annals of best-selling authors, modesty is a rare element. The American Jewish writer Herman Wouk, who has died at the age of 103, is a happy exception to this rule. Despite his fame for the novel, play, and filmed versions of the “Caine Mutiny,”, “The Winds of War,” and “Marjorie Morningstar,” Wouk repeatedly…
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Why My Father Wouldn’t Let Me Read Marjorie Morningstar
When I was a young teenager in the late 1970s, my father forbade me to read “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk’s 1955 novel chronicling the eponymous Marjorie’s coming of age in the 1930s. Marjorie, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked their way out of the Bronx and to Manhattan’s Upper West Side,…
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Remembering Herman Wouk: “Why I Had To Go To Germany”
Editors note: One of the most celebrated authors of the 20th century, Herman Wouk — author of “Marjorie Morningstar,” “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” and “The Lawgiver” — has died at the age of 103. In this excerpt from “Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author,” Wouk explains how encountering historian Raul Hilberg helped…
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For Adrienne Rich, On Her 90th Birthday
At some point in your life, you will likely hear the maxim that the personal is political. Afterward, you will look at the paraphernalia of your existence, and wonder which parts, exactly, are covered by that idea. Your routine when you wake up? What you choose to cook? What you say when you greet a…
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Is ‘Catch-22’ About Joseph Heller’s Jewish Air Force Peer?
In spirit if not content, Joseph Heller’s World War II satire “Catch 22” (1961) is a very Jewish property. When Mike Nichols directed the 1970 film adaptation of the novel, he cast fellow Yid Alan Arkin as the lead character, Captain John Yossarian, a defiant air force officer who tries to end his flying days…
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