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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Masha Gessen’s Definitive Take On Contemporary Russia Is The Work Of A Lifetime
“I wanted to write a story about how Russian democracy didn’t come to be,” Masha Gessen said. We were discussing Gessen’s “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. In the book, Gessen tells the story of Russia’s post-Soviet evolution through the intertwining stories of seven…
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Film & TV Louis C.K. Responds To Sexual Misconduct Allegations: ‘These Stories Are True’
Louis C.K. says that the “stories are true.” We knew that Louis C.K.’s world was dark and conflicted. But we hoped that he had transmuted all of those roiling observations and desires into comedy gold. Now it turns out that he had some desires that found an end not in comedy, but in tragedy. Rather…
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A 95-year-old war hero tells his story
Guy Stern still remembers the day he almost saved his family
The Latest
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Movie News: Polanski, Dunham, ‘Bar Bahar,’ And The Trailer For Spielberg’s Latest
The weekend is almost upon us, so its time for Movie Thursday, that most venerable of Forward traditions. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 120 years – or since last week, when we debuted the feature – Movie Thursday is the day when we talk about movies: Thursday. It’s a…
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Film & TV Fran Drescher, Forward Gala Host, Discusses ‘The Nanny,’ Cancer Activism And Netanyahu
The voice. The hair. The unpretentious, absolute Jewishness. Fran Drescher, creator, writer and star of the hit 1990s sitcom “The Nanny,” healthcare advocate and recent “Broad City” guest star, is an essential figure in contemporary Jewish American culture. Luckily for the Forward, she’s also serving as Master of Ceremonies at our 120th Anniversary Gala on…
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This Sexual Assault Story From 1913 Is All Too Familiar Today
Though some of the presentation is different, this story from the Forward’s June 23, 1913, edition is all too familiar: A man in power abuses a young woman or girl so egregiously that she can’t even stop to think of the consequences of speaking out, and she protests. As soon as her protest is made…
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Why Brandeis University Cancelled A Lenny Bruce-Inspired Play
A production of Michael Weller’s “Buyer Beware” at Brandeis University was cancelled following objections to its Lenny Bruce-inspired content, The New York Times reported on Monday. Weller, best known for his plays “Moonchildren” (1971) and “Loose Ends” (1979), also wrote the scripts for the film adaptations of “Hair” (1979) and “Ragtime” (1981). “Buyer Beware” was…
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Holocaust Survivor’s Piano Teaches A Lesson In Shared Humanity
When Shlomo Margaliot was 15 years old, his mother sewed a stack of Reichsmarks into his shirt and sent him on the most important errand of his young life: He was to purchase four tickets for a ship to Palestine, where the family planned to escape from Nazi Germany. But when Margaliot reached the ticket…
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Why My Polish High School Teaches Yiddish
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Few people know that there’s a high school in Warsaw that teaches Yiddish. In fact, it’s probably the only one in all of Europe that does. I know because I recently graduated from there and I was one of its Yiddish students. This isn’t a Jewish school….
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Hildebrand Gurlitt’s Art Hoard, Possibly Ill-Gotten During WWII, Makes Public Debut
This past week, over 400 works from the collection of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a German art dealer who traded in “degenerate art” on behalf of the Nazi government, went on display at Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern as well as the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany. Gurlitt’s 1,400 work collection, discovered in 2012, has been the subject of steady…
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Books Forverts Editorial: What’s Our Agenda?
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As editor of the Forverts, most of the questions I get from readers involve either the price of an obituary or a request to decipher a handwritten postcard written by a deceased relative. Recently, though, I got an email with a very different sort of question: “I’d…
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