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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How Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott identified with the Jews
Editor’s Note: Derek Walcott would have turned 90 today. In honor of this date, we’re revisiting this essay written on the occasion of the poet’s death on March 17, 2017. Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from the West Indies who died March 17 at age 87, was long inspired by Jewish culture, history and…
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50 years later, ‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’ is a Holocaust film like no other
On a summer day in the northern Italian city of Ferrara, a band of youths, dressed in immaculate white, arrive at the walled gates of a garden, open to the public for the first time in a decade. They are there at the invitation of the young lady of the manor for a tennis tournament….
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Watch: Peter Beinart, Jodi Rudoren chat Israel, 2020 elections
Join Forward editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren in conversation about Israel with Peter Beinart, CUNY professor, editor at large for Jewish Currents, contributor to The Atlantic and author of “The Crisis of Zionism”. Their discussion, “Is Peace Possible?,” will take place on February 9 at 5 p.m. at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. To find out…
The Latest
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Jeff Goldblum, Marc Maron and Terry Gross find their roots
Two celebrated interviewers and perhaps the most eccentric interview subject of all time, learned about their shared Jewish pasts in Eastern Europe on PBS’s “Finding Your Roots.” On the January 21 episode of the series, podcaster and comedian Marc Maron, “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross and actor Jeff Goldblum found common ground: Namely, the Eastern…
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Art Did Walter Benjamin understand his prize possession — Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus?
Of all the icons to emerge from the left-wing politics of the last century, it is among the most talked about and the least looked at, the most mystical and the most frightening. It is probably the unlikeliest and also, by a country mile, the weirdest. Its caretakers make up the most exclusive club in…
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Yes, exclusion of women in Jewish Studies is still a problem
To The Editor: The Forward recently published an article by Marcin Wodzinski that was framed as a response to an article we wrote for the Forward more than a year ago about women’s underrepresentation in our field of Jewish Studies. Our original article expressed profound concern that a new 850-page history of Hasidism had no…
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Oy — Why those ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ ads are pretty, pretty bad
It’s only right that they be dissected
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This Jewish family was nominated for more Oscars than any other
There is no name in film music that carries as much cachet as “Newman.” I can prove it: you probably don’t know which Newman I’m talking about. While John Williams has an impressive 52 Oscar nominations, the Newman family, collectively, have 95. Here are more numbers. This year alone, two Newmans, cousins Thomas and Randy,…
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Pot Roast Then & Now: A spicy tale of Jewish mothers and daughters
What can a Jewish cookbook from 1946 tell us about the 21st-century Jewish-American experience? Liza Schoenfein, the Forward’s senior food writer, and Jane Ziegelman, a culinary historian, took our signature collection of Yiddish recipes off the shelf and found a direct line from the balaboostas of yore to the kitchens of today. How Home Economics…
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Film & TV There’s something very Jewish about Winnie-The-Pooh — and it’s not just Eeyore’s attitude
Editor’s Note: A.A. Milne, the creator of the “Winnie-the-Pooh” stories was born on this day in 1882. To commemorate his birthday, we look back at the Jewish elements in his work. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories have delighted youngsters for over 90 years, as have their numerous spinoffs as TV shows, cartoons, holiday specials, movies and,…
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How Leo Hurwitz, hounded by McCarthy, changed documentary film
One proof of documentarian Leo Hurwitz’s genius is how he continued working and innovating even while he was blacklisted. As America was in the fever of the red panic, the leftist filmmaker — perhaps best-remembered for capturing the syndicated TV footage Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem — was still in demand, though officially barred…
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