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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Q & A: Rebecca Traister On Women’s Rage
Rebecca Traister and I spoke about women’s anger on an angry day, during an exceptionally angry week. It was the last Tuesday in September. The evening before, in the wake of the Deborah Ramirez’s allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her, Kavanaugh and his wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, had given…
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UB40 Has A Bit Of A Jewish Past — Along With A Role In Kavanaugh Drama
It appears the young Brett Kavanaugh liked reggae — but maybe not as much as he liked beer. It’s now emerged that the embattled Supreme Court nominee was involved in a bar fight with a man he believed to be the lead singer of the British reggae group UB40. Oy. We could use a drink….
The Latest
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The Secret Jewish History Of Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour, the French singer and songwriter of Armenian origin who died on October 1 at age 94, made a career out of incarnating vulnerable minorities. Aznavour was a fragile, diminutive man with haggard, lined features, even in his thirties. His large, liquid eyes, capable of expressing a range of emotions from rapture to terror,…
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The Secret Jewish History Of ‘A Star Is Born’
Like the cicadas that spend most of their lives underground, emerging only every 13 or 17 years (and how they decide is for you to know and me to find out), the movie musical “A Star Is Born” gets remade every few decades or so. The latest incarnation, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, is…
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The Path to Enlightenment: Muslims, Brothers, Jews
During a recent visit to Paris, I had a remarkable encounter that affirmed my faith in humanity. At a dinner party hosted by dear friends Annie Cohen-Solal and Marc Mézard, my wife and I met two extraordinary octogenarians whom Le Monde calls “les jumeaux de l’Islam,” the twins of Islam.) Adel Rifaat and Bahgat Elnadi…
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Music How An Irish Playwright Found The Soul Of Bob Dylan
About a quarter way into Conor McPherson’s play with music, “Girl From the North Country” (running through Sunday, December 9, at the Public Theater in lower Manhattan), a bible salesman unaccountably mutters this apparent non sequitur: Big storm’s coming, my boy. Here. Europe. Everywhere. You ever wonder what woulda happened if the Jews met the…
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Film & TV Matthew Weiner Doesn’t Remember Misconduct With ‘Mad Men’ Writer
Matthew Weiner was reflecting on his management style this Yom Kippur, but continues to deny charges of misconduct involving a female employee. In a Vanity Fair profile released in advance of the “Mad Men” creator’s new Amazon series, “The Romanoffs,” Joy Press, the piece’s writer, noted that Weiner appeared “palpably nervous, his conversation a tangle…
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Why Transliteration Matters
As defined by Merriam-Webster’s, “transliteration” means “to represent or spell in the characters of another alphabet.” And, one unexpected aspect of writing about language is learning how many people around the world turn out to be passionately concerned with transliteration. For example, I have received numerous missives on the spelling of mamaloshn, or “mother tongue”…
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How A Lost 1955 Bar Mitzvah Album And Its Owner Were Reunited
On Thursday, September 20, 2018 at the Jewel-Osco supermarket in Chicago, Jenni Spinner, a freelance writer and editor, found a 1955 Bar Mitzvah album on top of a stack of Lagunitas IPA 12 packs in the liquor department. What such an interesting personal item was doing there we still don’t know, but thanks to some…
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A Stand-Up Tragedy From The Mind Of David Grossman
After two hours and 40 minutes of brutal self-flagellation, Dov Greenstein stumbled exhaustedly around a raised wooden stage strewn with flowers: his shirt torn, his pants ripped, his face battered and painted with blood. “I’m a little tired now,” he said, exhaling as the lights dimmed and the stage faded to black at the end…
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Film & TV From An Exiled Filmmaker, A Rock ‘N’ Roll Parable
“I’ve lived for eight months as if on the other side of the mirror,” an exasperated Kirill Serebrennikov told a judge in Moscow on April 18 of this year. It was the Russian-Jewish director’s most recent day in court since being placed under house arrest last August on corruption charges that are widely considered to…
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