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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Why The Idea Of An Egalitarian Kibbutz Was Always A Myth
The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World By Ran Abramitzky Princeton, $29.95, 360 pages It’s funny to think of kibbutzim as an experiment in radical social equality, since they excluded nonskilled and non-Ashkenazi Israeli Jews. That paradox is not totally lost on Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky, who writes, in the…
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Natalie Portman Just Made A Really Big Mistake
Natalie Portman has announced that she will not travel to Israel to accept the Genesis Prize, informally known as “the Jewish Nobel,” an award in the past given to the likes of artist Anish Kapoor, violinist Itzhak Perlman, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and actor-director Michael Douglas. By taking this public stance at…
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How The 1939 World’s Fair Sold America On Zionism
At the tail end of the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II, the 1939 New York World’s Fair offered weary, anxious Americans an escape from the dismal present into an ecstatic future. Over the fair’s six-month span, 44 million people descended on a former ash dump in Flushing, Queens, to experience…
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Serena Dykman on ‘Nana’ and the State of Holocaust Education
Serena Dykman grew up hearing stories of the Holocaust: Her grandparents were survivors, and her maternal grandmother, Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant, was a renowned Holocaust educator, who spoke about her experiences around the world. Years after Maryla’s death, when Serena witnessed the aftermath of anti-Semitic terror attacks in Brussels and Paris, she decided it was time to…
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Swastika Gets You In Free To This German Theater For Hitler Play. Really?
Here’s a tip: If anyone currently in hot water with a minority group tells you the last thing they want to do is offend that group, they probably have not devoted much thought to what sorts of things that group might find offensive. In 2018 alone, a California Polytechnic State University fraternity released a statement,…
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Film & TV The Nazi-Era Thriller That Got Its Director Banned From Filmmaking
Among its various achievements, the 1943 thriller “Le Corbeau” (or “The Raven”) earned its director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, a lifetime ban from filmmaking. Clouzot had made his caustic movie during the height of the Nazi occupation of France for a German-controlled production company called Continental Films, which had been created by Joseph Goebbels to pacify French…
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Totally Gross Domino’s Pizza Celebrates Israeli Independence
Domino’s Pizza launched a line of special edition pies in Israel this week to mark the country’s 70th anniversary. What could better encapsulate Israeli independence better than falafel and shawarma on a pizza, someone in the local franchise offices surely asked. For a country whose culinary star is rising in popularity worldwide because of its…
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Music How A Jewish Teacher Helped Jay-Z Find His Passion For Language
Without the support of one Jewish sixth-grade teacher in Brooklyn, Shawn Carter might never have become Jay-Z. During a conversation with David Letterman on the former “Late Show” host’s new show, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” the rapper and entrepreneur discussed how his former teacher, Renee Rosenblum-Lowden, played a critical role in fomenting his…
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In Antony Sher-Led ‘King Lear,’ Humor Becomes An Instrument Of Tragedy
Shakespeare’s “King Lear” has been a different play every time I have read or seen it. It’s a parable about the inevitable abuse of power, a vivisection of the profoundly complex relationships between parents and children, a reflection on the seemingly pre-determined cycles of violence and decay that characterize political society. It is a moral…
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Why The Ten Commandments Are Practices of Liberation
A high school teacher of mine used to entertain his class by rattling off lists of oxymorons: pretty ugly, jumbo shrimp, constant variable. Sometimes he would take the opportunity to editorialize a little: military intelligence, airplane food, liberal religion. Everybody would smirk and the class would go on. The joke relied on the notion that…
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WATCH: On Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 75th Anniversary, Remember Heroes With ‘Hymn Of The Partisans’
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Thursday April 19 marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In remembrance of the occasion, last week I posted a collection of various renditions of Hirsh Glik’s partisan’s song, the “Hymn of the Partisans,” on the Yiddish Forward’s video blog Oyneg Shabes….
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