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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Film & TV 8 young Jewish comedians on what ‘SNL 50’ means to them
'Saturday Night Live' may be entering middle age, but these rising Jewish comics are just getting started.
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What Jews Can Learn From ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
When Margaret Atwood published “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1984, the dystopian genre in literature was about to change. The books that had defined it, including Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” had been preoccupied with the threat of socialist totalitarianism. Atwood wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale” in West Berlin, in the shadow of…
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The Secret Jewish History of Cat Stevens Revisited
When I went off to sleep-away camp in 1972 for the first time, the soundtrack of the summer — especially for those like me, who arrived with guitar in hand — was all Cat Stevens, all the time. By 1972, Stevens had already achieved his greatest success with a stunning trio of albums released in…
The Latest
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How Emmy Runner-Up Jackie Hoffman Journeyed From Shtetl to Hollywood to Broadway
At last night’s Emmy Awards, actress Jackie Hoffman gained notoriety for seeming, uh, ungracious for her reaction to losing out on a trophy to Laura Dern. To commemorate (or observe) that open, we’re re-running our interview with the actress from earlier this year. Actress/comedienne Jackie Hoffman has long been a fixture on the New York…
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Paranoia, Spies and Ariel Sharon in Nathan Englander’s Twisty New Thriller
Dinner at the Center of the Earth By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $26.95 In his fiction, Nathan Englander has written with uncommon verve about the varieties of Jewish experience. Among other subjects, he’s tackled the Holocaust and its legacy (“The Tumblers,” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”) the…
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The Global Economic Crisis — Seen In The Outstretched Hands of Berlin’s Poor
I park my bicycle in front of the organic grocery store and lock it among the others. I’m proud of my bike, a Gudereit Fantasy Classic, which together with the lock and child seat cost around eight hundred euros or close to a thousand dollars. Among the other bikes stationed there it is nothing special….
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Does Ionesco’s ‘Rhinoceros’ Lose Something in Yiddish Translation?
New Yiddish Rep’s (NYR) 2013 production of “Waiting For Godot,” staged to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s great existential comedy, was ground-breaking. Its Yiddish speaking characters cast a new, more profound light on the masterpiece. Indeed, they evoked Holocaust survivors wandering across a post-apocalyptic landscape, especially as they talked about the ashes and…
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New Digital Platform To Bring Jewish Family History To Life
Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History has launched an interactive digital platform for Jewish families to explore their heritage. Called “Re:collection,” it invites Jews to upload and curate media that helps to tell the stories of themselves and their ancestors, exchanging familial narratives with other participants. It was created by the museum in collaboration…
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Film & TV How Frederick Wiseman Shot The Great American Novel
They may never get around to writing the Great American Novel, but in the meantime if people need to get a sense of what it’s like to live in this country, they could do a lot worse than to have a close reading of the films of Frederick Wiseman. Since the late 1960s, the indefatigable…
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Paul Auster Snags Spot On Man Booker Prize Shortlist
Paul Auster’s novel “4 3 2 1” has earned a spot on the 2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist. It is one of six novels named to be a finalist for the prestigious literary prize. Also on the shortlist are Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West,” Fiona Mozley’s “Elmet,” George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Ali Smith’s “Autumn,”…
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Rod Blagojevich Is Reading Viktor Frankl In Prison, Still Not A Martyr
Lest you have forgotten, a reminder: Rod Blagojevich, former Illinois governor, was impeached and removed from office, and separately convicted on 18 federal corruption charges — 5 of which have since been vacated — for, among other wrongs, trying to sell the former Senate seat of Barack Obama after his election to the presidency. Blagojevich…
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Music How 9/11 Changed Pink Floyd And Roger Waters For Me
I went to see Roger Waters, late of Pink Floyd, play a Brooklyn arena last night. It was September 11, a fact that seemed irrelevant when I bought the tickets. Once you get over the embarrassment of watching a 70-year-old man get worked up over lyrics he wrote when he was thirty (what if they…
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Fast Forward Trump says Jews would deserve much of the blame if he loses
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Culture Hitler is trending on TikTok again — and they’re trying to make him seem like a nice guy
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Opinion This GOP candidate has always been antisemitic — so why are Republicans only panicking about him now?
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Fast Forward Sitcom star encourages non-Jews like her to hang mezuzahs on their homes
In Case You Missed It
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Looking Forward An Israeli hip-hop artist remembers a day of hope in Gaza
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Sports The Jewish Sport Report: How the Chicago White Sox made a bad year even worse for Jewish fans
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Oct. 7: One Year Later A different closet: Queer Zionists navigate the post-Oct. 7 dating scene
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Looking Forward Why won’t Kamala Harris talk about her brisket?
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