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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Watch An Animated Introduction To Anna Freud
On July 4, 2018, Open Culture featured a video from Alain de Botton’s School of Life Youtube series wherein Freud’s favorite daughter, Anna, swats away blowfish and frolics among cutouts of a drunkard, a dejected child and a mustachioed gymnast with a bib and pacifier. It’s quite the ride. The six and a half minute…
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Forverts Seeks More Stories About Your Favorite Heirlooms
Earlier this year, the Forverts asked readers to submit anecdotes and photos of their favorite heirlooms. Heirlooms are not only a way of keeping us connected to our past; they are also a wonderful way to transmit family history to our children and grandchildren The response to our search was an enthusiastic one and 22…
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How A Daughter Of The French Resistance Learned The Truth Of Her Roots
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This article is part of a series based on oral-history interviews with students of Yiddish and other members of the community at the Medem Library ~ Paris Yiddish Center. The first article appeared in Yiddish on March 18. Simone Virsube’s story begins in 1946, some months after…
The Latest
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How Hasidic Sages Supported Transgender People — 200 Years Ago
Editor’s note: We are republishing this interview with Abby Stein in honor of her new book, “Becoming Eve,” being published this week. This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Abby Stein, who grew up in a rabbinical family in Williamsburg, is the most prominent Hasidic person to come out as transgender after leaving her…
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Film & TV Meet The Real Mrs. Maisel: Jean Carroll
I am a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, where I am currently working on a monograph about the very first Jewish female comedian, Jean Carroll — which is an academic way of saying that I am very, very invested in the actual Jewish, female pioneer of stand-up. I wasn’t sure that “Mrs. Maisel” would do…
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Hollywood’s Most Prolific Songwriter Celebrates 90
With two giant-size Oscar statues flanking either side of the stage of Beverly Hills’ Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, one couldn’t have asked for a better finale to an perfect evening: After all the speakers and performers ascended the stage, a film clip from “Mary Poppins” and the lyrics of “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” appeared on…
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‘The Catcher Was A Spy’ Strikes Out On Jewish Themes
There’s a moment in “The Catcher Was a Spy,” the new Paul Rudd-led biopic about the Major League catcher, polyglot and American operative, Morris “Moe” Berg that feels out of place. In the scene, Berg (Rudd) is in the cabin of a ship headed for the coast of Italy. Joining Berg is the physicist, Samuel…
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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…
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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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