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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Theater Jason Alexander lives out a lifelong dream, playing Tevye in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
'I wanted to do a piece that is proudly Semitic' said the Tony winner and ‘Seinfeld' star
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Where Are All The Women In Jewish Studies?
The Smithsonian has celebrated a new book, “Hasidism: A New History,” edited by David Biale, as a landmark. This collaborative effort of eight men has been underway for a decade, and the publication is massive: 850 pages. All written by men. The preface informs us that a distinguished female scholar of Hasidism participated extensively in…
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No, Mike Huckabee — Moses Would Be A Bad Supreme Court Pick
On Friday, June 29th, 2018, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, Twitter’s least favorite purveyor of dad jokes, made a bold claim about one of our prophets on Fox News. In the aftermath of the news of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, Huckabee, speaking to Fox’s Bill Hemmer, claimed that if Trump “put Moses up for the…
The Latest
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Trump Is What Happens When We Forget #NeverForget
To state the painfully and terrifyingly obvious, the world is in a state of severe political and moral crisis — one we haven’t seen since the 1930s. The great postwar consensus, seventy years in the making, in which democracy was predominant and dictatorships had flagged, and in which cooperation replaced conflict, has been largely undone…
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How Hasidism Still Manages To Thrive
Hasidism: A New History By David Biale & 7 co-authors Princeton UniversityPress, 896 pages, $45.00 In 1770, a young man of 18, later to be known as Solomon Maimon, traveled from Nesvizh in Lithuania to the court of Dov Ber, the foremost leader of the budding Hasidic movement, in the Polish town of Mezerich. As…
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Why Everyone Is Buzzing About The Words ‘Infest’ And ‘Civility’
Language has become a flash point of the political landscape. What did it mean when first lady Melania Trump wore a jacket bearing the words “I really don’t care, do u?” to a detention center for immigrant children? What about when President Trump said immigrants would “infest” the United States, or when pundits responded to…
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Sci-Fi Visionary Harlan Ellison Reveled In His Jewishness
Harlan Ellison, the American Jewish author of speculative fiction who died on June 27 at age 84, proved that early struggles with anti-Semitism could provide literary, as well as moral, inspiration. Ellison’s dystopian science fiction landmarks included “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” The Deathbird,” and “Angry Candy.” Born in Cleveland, he was…
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Dressing Modestly Didn’t Mean What I Thought It Did
The very first time I was invited to a wedding by a peer, the ceremony was Orthodox. I am not Orthodox. But I knew how to dress the part. So the night before the wedding, I paraded my most modest clothing for Shmuel, an Orthodox friend. I chose an outfit I felt demonstrated that I…
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Where Jewish Rights And Human Rights Intersect And Diverge
Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century By James Loeffler Yale University Press, 384 pages, $32.50 Following Winston Churchill’s prediction in 1942 that the war against fascism would “end with the enthronement of human rights,” the phrase, which had rarely been used in the discourse of international law, began to gain currency….
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Are ‘14’ And ‘88’ Nazi Dog Whistles In Border Security Document — Or Just Numbers?
Sometimes a dog whistle can be a number, not a word. The number “88” appeared in a strange context in a press release from Homeland Security calling for building a border wall, along with a headline that had a total of fourteen words — but until today, no one seems to have noticed. Today, the…
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‘The Cakemaker’ Finds Eroticism In Baking And Grief
Set in Berlin and Jerusalem, “The Cakemaker” is just another boy-meets-boy, boy-loses-boy, boy-meets-boy’s-widow, widow-falls-for-boy story. In other words, it’s unlike anything you’re likely to see this year, and an unflinching, ravishing look at a broken romantic triangle. In the film, married-with-kid Israeli businessman Oren, a frequent visitor to Berlin, falls for German baker Thomas —…
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Why A Hebrew Phrase Is Causing A Hullabaloo In Austria
Over beers in Jerusalem, a writer I know shared a fascinating linguistic tidbit from his recent research trip to Austria. He said he had heard the Hebrew phrase tohu va’vohu, from Genesis 1:2, memorably translated by Everett Fox as “wild and waste,” used in Vienna. As slang, he thought. In any case, tohu va’vohu seemed…
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Yiddish יוביליי־נומער פֿון „ביראָבידזשאַן“ באַערט אַמאָליקע מאָלערס און עטנישע פֿאַרשידנאַרטיקייטAnniversary issue of Birobidzhan features historic artists and ethnic diversity
דער זשורנאַל, גרויס ווי אַ גאַנץ בוך, נעמט אויך אַרײַן טײַגע־לידער און פֿאַקטאַזיע־ווערק.
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Fast Forward National Book Awards defends award for Ta-Nehisi Coates’ dad, a publisher who reissued antisemitic books
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Fast Forward Argentina seizes trove of Nazi memorabilia as part of international arms investigation
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Yiddish יוביליי־נומער פֿון „ביראָבידזשאַן“ באַערט אַמאָליקע מאָלערס און עטנישע פֿאַרשידנאַרטיקייטAnniversary issue of Birobidzhan features historic artists and ethnic diversity
דער זשורנאַל, גרויס ווי אַ גאַנץ בוך, נעמט אויך אַרײַן טײַגע־לידער און פֿאַקטאַזיע־ווערק.
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