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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Mahmoud Abbas Plans To Reprint An Iraqi-Israeli Jew’s Tale Of Displacement
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he wants Arab leaders to know about the historical plight of Arab Jewry. To educate them, he’s reviving a forgotten piece of the Israeli Arab canon — though it’s likely a text he misread. On November 16, at his headquarters in Ramallah, Abbas met with members of the late…
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Adam Sandler Speaks! Some New Jewish Facts About The Comedy Legend
In his first magazine profile since 1996, Adam Sandler, primed to debut an intense and morally itchy performance as diamond dealer Howard Ratner in the Safdie Brothers’s “Uncut Gems,” appears menschy and family-oriented. The November 27 write-up by The New York Times’s Jamie Lauren Keiles is also, unsurprisingly, an insanely Jewish affair. It begins at…
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ScarJo Regrets Casting Controversy, But Won’t Apologize For Backing Woody Allen
Responding to her continued and controversial defense of Woody Allen, Scarlett Johansson has stated that she will not censor her personal opinions in the interest of optics. In a November 26 Vanity Fair profile, journalist Chris Heath asked Johansson about widespread criticism of her stated belief in Allen’s innocence in the case of his daughter…
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Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Deborah Levy And More Crack NYT 100 Notable Books Of 2019
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s account of their Pulitzer-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein and a collection of stories by Peter Orner are among The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2019. Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble” is one of a number of significant works of fiction on the list, including…
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A Brief Guide To Martin Scorsese’s Jewish And ‘Jew-ish’ Films
Martin Scorsese, the Little Italy-raised, second-generation son of Italian-American garment workers, was born into the piping-hot melting pot he spent a lifetime committing to film. His awareness of America, while observed from a particular — often extralegal — vantage point, is supreme even among his impressive cohort of auteurs: Spielberg, Coppola and De Palma. Naturally,…
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Music The Spiritual Beauty Of Jimi Hendrix’s Star-Spangled Banner
I was a fifteen-year-old, not-very-hip teenager during the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, which I did not attend. I did watch the movie, though, soon afterwards, and when the fiftieth anniversary rolled around this August, I watched it again. This time, as the High Holy Days approached, I was particularly struck by the festival’s final…
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Famous Sholem Aleichem Statue Defaced With Swastikas In Ukraine
In 1905, the writer Sholem Aleichem fled his native Ukraine after witnessing a brutal pogrom in Kiev. In 1997, that city erected a monument to him. He eventually found his way to America, but he wrote of his homeland for the rest of his life. And this past weekend, unknown vandals painted bright red swastikas…
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Q & A: Is A Conspiracy Theory Responsible For This Year’s Shocking Nobel Prize In Literature?
The October announcement of Austrian novelist Peter Handke as the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature was greeted, by many, with confusion. Handke, apologist for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president who oversaw the Bosnian genocide? Handke, who spoke at Milosevic’s funeral and told critics of his decision to do so to “go to…
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The Forward: Our Vision, Mission, and Values
At the Forward, our Vision and Mission articulate the change we want to see in the world, and how we can help make it happen. Our Values describe the essential pieces of who we are and how we operate. After 120+ years spent serving the Jewish community, and with our new global reach and purely…
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Today In Corrections: Lt. Col Vindman Was Wounded By An IED, Not An IUD
Did you hear about how Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the decorated Jewish war hero, childhood refugee and damning witness in the Trump impeachment probe received his Purple Heart? For a moment in GQ magazine, the cause was depicted as quite a private matter, thank you very much. Every so often corrective italics at the end…
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Ben Lerner, Rachel Louise Snyder Round Out New York Times’s 10 Best Books Of 2019
Stories of escape, abduction, friendship, growth and crisis make up The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2019, announced November 22. The Times’s fiction picks include Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School,” the writer’s third novel. In it, Lerner, through the voices of several characters, evokes the Kansas of his Clinton-era late adolescence. The novel’s…
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