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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This Childishly Idiotic Fake Cover Isn’t Donald Trump’s First ‘Time’ Embarrassment
The Washington Post recently reported that a framed Time magazine cover featuring Donald Trump is hanging in at least five of the president’s golf courses. This would not be in any way newsworthy except for the fact that the cover is a poorly done fake. Yes, it seems as if Trump or somebody in the…
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Meet The Houston Mom, Activist And Literary Critic Running For Congress
In the weeks following the 2016 presidential election, Laura Moser found a new mission. Moser, 39, was living in Washington D.C., working as a freelance writer – she has, on occasion, written for the Forward – and taking care of her two young children. Newly engaged in politics after Donald Trump’s win, she saw a…
The Latest
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How Isaac Babel Became The Bard Of Jewish Loss And Fate
This Month Anne Reads: “Gedali,” by Isaac Babel Born in 1894, he fell into the hellish century that lay just ahead. He wrote in Russian. He was a Communist. He was a university educated Jew. He was executed by firing squad January 27, 1940, in the Butyrka Prison in Moscow. He was having an affair…
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Zach Woods Of ‘Silicon Valley’ Is The Best Jewish Comedian You’re Not Watching
If you’ve ever seen HBO’s amazingly awkward “Silicon Valley,” you know Zach Woods. His portrayal of Jared Dunn, the loyal, wilting, strangely motherly, secretly German-speaking C.F.O of Pied Piper, the fictional startup which the series follows, has consistently been one of the series’ sleeper gems. Luckily for us, Woods is Jewish, so those of us…
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Film & TV Was ‘Full Metal Jacket’ Stanley Kubrick’s Stealth Holocaust Movie?
As we mark the 30th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War movie “Full Metal Jacket,” which was released June 17, 1987, it’s hard to think of a less Jewish topic than the training of a bunch of misfit Marines for a subsequent tour of duty in Vietnam. Indeed, in his famous taxonomy of what was…
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Why Monument Valley II Is The Most Beautiful Mobile Game Of 2017
Earlier in the month, British game design firm Ustwo Games, released the follow up to 2014’s wildly successful phone and tablet game Monument Valley. For the uninitiated, Monument Valley is a sort of puzzle game – you move your character around an isometric MC Escher like structure, manipulating levers and rotating towers, in order to reach…
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The ‘Harry Potter’ Series Is 20 — But Is It Jewish?
Twenty years ago, the very first published pages of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series hit bookstores in the United Kingdom. The ensuing decades have seen the books give rise to a worldwide fandom, a successful film series, a thriving fanfiction community, and several theme parks — as well as the eternal question: Is Harry Potter…
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Film & TV A Tolkien Takes On The Holocaust
Yet another Tolkien production’s opening this summer. But this one takes place in our world, not Middle Earth. And its creator isn’t Lord of the Rings wizard JRR Tolkien, but his 27-year-old great-grandson Nicholas. “Terezin,” Nicholas Tolkien’s first play, debuted June 20 in New York; it’s a harrowing descent into the hell of Terezin, which…
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Film & TV Why A Jewish Filmmaker Took On A Muslim Girl’s Story For PBS
At the very end of “Dalya’s Other Country,” a young woman named Dalya — the documentary’s namesake — attends the January protests at Los Angeles International Airport against the president’s first travel ban. Accompanied by her two brothers and wearing a hijab, she carries a piece of poster board on which she has written in…
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Amid New York’s Abundance, Embracing A Life Of Diminished Expectations
The weather is warm the day we arrive. As a child, I would never have been in the city on this day. Like other privileged city children I would have been evacuated to the country, away from the polluted air, the city pools and the open fire hydrants. Or I would have been sent away…
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Art To Diane Arbus, Every Portrait Was A Self Portrait
AT first glance, Diane Arbus’s parks look like our parks — and yet they stand apart from them. What might a Martian learn about us from this, people sometimes ask of a text. Arbus’s photos would tell a Martian little: They rather look as though they may have been made by one. ‘In the Park,”…
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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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Culture You can buy Sukkot gift boxes that say ‘tuchus’ on Amazon
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Fast Forward Sitcom star encourages non-Jews like her to hang mezuzahs on their homes
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Opinion A maelstrom around Rashida Tlaib shows how broken discourse about the war has become
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