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
-
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.
-
Painting Stolen By The Nazis To Go Up For Auction In Austria
According to a Guardian report, a painting stolen by the Nazis is set to be auctioned by the Im Kinsky auction house in Vienna next week. Van der Helst’s “Portrait of a Man,” a 17th century Dutch Master work, was stolen from the collection of Adolphe Schloss in 1943, a Jewish-German businessman who lived in…
-
Why Chernobyl’s Jewish History Still Matters — 31 Years After The Accident
My aunt recently reminded me that everything changed on April 26, 1986. I knew this, of course, but it wasn’t often that my family talked about the accident or the evacuation. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my grandfather Mikhail spoke proudly of his work at a nuclear power plant, as well as of…
The Latest
-
Remembering The Man Who Fixed The Legendary ‘Quiz Show’ Of 1956
Albert Freedman, the game show producer featured in “Quiz Show” (1994), the Oscar-winning film by Robert Redford, died on April 11 at age 95. Although he was a secondary character in Redford’s film, played by Hank Azaria, in real life he was at the heart of a maelstrom of TV scandals during the Eisenhower era…
-
A Personal History Of Holocaust Remembrance
At this time of year, public memory in Israel is most intense. Things come to a head in the course of a single week, from the morning of Yom HaShoah until the end of Yom HaZikaron. I call this period Bein Hatzefirot, “Between The Sirens,” because it begins with a minute-long siren the morning of…
-
Adam Greenberg Wants To Be Remembered For More Than Just One Fateful Pitch
Adam Greenberg always viewed being Jewish as a central part of his story. He had even more reason to emphasize that point during a recent appearance at a Jewish United Fund event in suburban Chicago. Addressing a group of parents with their school-age children, Greenberg told them, “You know when people say life throws you…
-
The Secret Jewish History Of Neil Gaiman And ‘American Gods’
According to Neil Gaiman, advance reviews for ‘American Gods,” mini-series based on his novel, are “kind of astonishing.” The central premise of “American Gods” (which debuts on Starz April 30) is that immigrants coming to America brought their mythology and gods with them. But over generations, the newcomers succumbed to different deities, technology, money, celebrity…
-
Will Radiohead Resist The Call To Boycott Israel?
Radiohead is scheduled to play a gig in Tel Aviv July 19, as the Forward reported in February. Several of Radiohead’s contemporaries have asked the band “to think again” about playing the gig, writing an open letter on the website Artists For Palestine-UK. The letter includes the likes of Roger Waters, Thurston Moore, TV on…
-
Trump’s Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day Statement Continues Tradition Of Denial
Today is not only Yom HaShoah, but also Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. As I have previously discussed, the Armenian Genocide, a crime for which the term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, has gone unacknowledged by Turkey, which perpetrated the genocide, and also by countries such as Israel, the U.K., and the United States. In…
-
Dmitry Kuzmin: The Russian Poet You Need To Read Right Now
At the end of one of Dmitry Kuzmin’s poems, there is a curious stanza, which, to an American reader comes across as an odd bit of legalese. But to a Russian like Kuzmin, the stanza is both a social critique and a method of self preservation (we will return to the rest of the poem…
-
Meet New Zealand’s Only Jewish Comic (Named Debbie)
Debbie Filler wanted to call her one-woman show “All My Lennys” — both Leonard Cohen and Leonard Bernstein loom large in the piece and in her life. But she settled on “I Did It My Way in Yiddish (In English),” a sly reference to her late father’s belief that Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, and “everybody…
-
I Will Never Match My Mother’s Good Deeds
A bright light lit up my room when my mother died. Or rather, when I was informed, from across the ocean, that my mother had died. It was an unwelcome illumination, the prosaic light of a cell phone, silent but insidious, like the message it was trying to convey. I don’t recall my father’s words…
Most Popular
- 1
Culture Hitler is trending on TikTok again — and they’re trying to make him seem like a nice guy
- 2
Culture You can buy Sukkot gift boxes that say ‘tuchus’ on Amazon
- 3
Fast Forward Sitcom star encourages non-Jews like her to hang mezuzahs on their homes
- 4
Opinion A maelstrom around Rashida Tlaib shows how broken discourse about the war has become
In Case You Missed It
-
Film & TV ‘Megalopolis’ and ‘The Brutalist’ build on Ayn Rand’s ‘Fountainhead,’ then blow up her ideas
-
Fast Forward LA man sentenced for drive-by shooting of Jews leaving synagogue
-
Culture Hassan Nasrallah was not a ‘towering leader’ — he was a terrorist
-
Oct. 7: One Year Later — Teen Voices Nearing a Prayer: How my violin has helped me learn to pray
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism