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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Benjamin Dreyer: Copyediting King
Benjamin Dreyer, 61, copy chief at Random House, managed to make his style guide, “Dreyer’s English,” a stunning critical and commercial success. In a genre historically associated with extreme stuffiness, Dreyer’s prose sparkles. He greets readers with a winning mix of smarts and snark — “I don’t want to write about the 19th-Century textual critic…
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Emily Mayer: The Activism Activator
IfNotNow has grown in prominence every year since its 2014 founding. But this past year proved to be its most high-profile one yet. Its campaign against Birthright Israel – planting activists to record themselves walking off the free trips – earned the group a New York Times profile. Local chapters, called “hives,” also came into…
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Nicholas Meyer: The Sleuth of Anti-Semitism
An early-20th Century detective story doesn’t feel like the timeliest of tales in 2019. But this year, when the Los Angeles-based writer Nicholas Meyer, 73, published “The Adventures of the Peculiar Protocols,” setting Sherlock Holmes on the trail of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the timing was disturbingly apt. In a world where…
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Julian Edelman: The Patriot
When you think about prominent Jews in the National Football League, various owners often come to mind. But there is also a 33-year-old, undersized, overachieving, insanely tough wide receiver named Julian Edelman. He’s Jewish, too. Edelman, possessor of three Super Bowl rings, is one of the best Jewish players to ever play the game, and…
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Howard Zucker: The Anti- Anti-Vaxxer
As measles outbreaks mainly in New York’s Haredi communities raged, Dr. Howard Zucker, the state’s health commissioner, met with Orthodox rabbis, visited religious summer camps and lobbied the legislature to eliminate the religious exemption for vaccination. Zucker, 60, who completed medical school at 22 and is also a lawyer qualified to argue before the Supreme…
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Forward 50 | Alma Hernandez: Intersectional politician
Before her election in November to the Arizona State Assembly at 25, Alma Hernandez had spent her years as an activist working on issues with direct connections to her background: immigration, health care and criminal justice. Hernandez’ mother was born in Nogales, Mexico, a border city through which countless immigrants have passed on their journey…
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Jeremy Borovitz: The Accidental Eyewitness
A New Jersey-bred rabbi’s son and Peace Corps member, Borovitz, 32, has long been drawn to Jewish Europe — it was the subject of his first conversation with Rebecca Blady, who became his wife, a rabbi as well, and his comrade in creating an irreverent, innovative outreach program called Base Berlin. Organizing largely through social…
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Forward 50 | Josh and Benny Safdie: The hoop dreamers
We have the Safdies to thank for pushing Adam Sandler outside of his sophomoric comfort zone for a career-best performance as gambling-addicted jeweler Howard Ratner. Their newly released film, “Uncut Gems,” elevates the brothers’ already remarkable, neon- and desperation-drenched oeuvre by taking on a different side of New York: The glitzy, Glatt-certified row of Manhattan’s…
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Rachel Sumekh: The Supreme Swiper
As an undergraduate at UCLA in 2010, Rachel Sumekh and a few friends experimented with donating the excess funds on the meal plans to classmates who needed them. Now 28, Sumekh runs a national nonprofit, Swipe Out Hunger, which enlists students at 100 universities to donate their unused meal points to peers struggling to pay…
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Forward 50 | Catherine Cohen: The comedy chanteuse
Catherine Cohen, 28, leapt onto the comedy scene with musical monologues that pay jazzy, manic homage to anxiety, exhibitionism and her reproductive health. She hosts a weekly revue of young, diverse talent at Club Cumming. A Houston native, Cohen can now be seen beyond the crowded cabaret space, making scene-stealing appearances in HBO’s “High Maintenance”…
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Dr. Margot Kushel: Warrior For The Homeless
Dr. Margot Kushel is one of the nation’s leading researchers into geriatric homelessness, she approaches the topic with her Jewish values in mind. In 2006, Kushel co-wrote the first study on the issue, discovering that the average age of the homeless population in the United States was in the mid-50s. Since then, Kushel, who is…
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