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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Who Ever Heard of an Irish Jew?
“Who ever heard of an Irish Jew?” It is a question that has been employed over time as an insult, an unlikely conversation starter, and the title of a celebrated short story collection. It is also a question I have been asked constantly since the publication of my own Irish-Jewish novel, “Nine Folds Make a…
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Why Andrew Ramer Is One of Our Most Righteous Men
Having spent 20 part-time years in the Jewish professional world, I’ve come to appreciate the Kabbalistic concept of the lamed-vavniks, the 36 righteous people who, hidden from view, are secretly maintaining the world by their good deeds. What I mean is, the Jewish teachers, leaders, innovators, and mensches who inspire me are mostly lesser known…
The Latest
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My Short and Bittersweet Relationship With an Online BFF
‘Needing brunch places in downtown Manhattan” was the posting I chose to respond to when looking through the online travel forum. It was payback time, my turn to help someone else. I was grateful for the suggestions I’d received from others when searching for a Mexican beach resort that wouldn’t require packing Imodium. To figure…
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The 26 Books We’re Sure To Be Reading This Year
Winter is theoretically a fabulous time for curling up with a hot drink and a book, although that’s a peculiar sentence to write on a 60-degree day in New York. Still, the cold weather will inevitably return, and with it the need to read, read, read. Our favorite picks for the endeavor —in fiction, nonfiction,…
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Reclusive Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter Suing Over Stolen DNA
You’d be forgiven for not knowing of Ike Perlmutter, even though he is the CEO of Marvel Entertainment; the Israeli-born executive is a notorious recluse. For a recluse, particularly a powerful and wealthy businessman, all theft is an immense transgression – even the theft of DNA. You read that right, Perlmutter is alleging that someone…
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Is This Sugarcane Plantation ‘America’s Auschwitz’?
The April issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a piece entitled “Inside America’s Auschwitz,” on the Whitney Plantation as “a rebuke – and an antidote to our sanitized history of slavery.” I came across this piece online, and I was drawn to the provocative headline as well as the setting, a town less than an hour…
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Trump’s Holocaust Remembrance Day Statement Is A Threefold Disgrace
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. But “Holocaust Remembrance” is not as clear cut a phrase as it might seem. In Poland, the government is suing Holocaust scholar Jan Gross over his work on the country’s role in the genocide. In Lithuania, another blood-soaked nation that refuses to reckon with its past, we see…
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David Ben-Gurion Makes An Argument For Israel, And More of The Forward Looking Back
100 Years Ago The Brownsville section of Brooklyn is so Jewish that in the local courthouse you’ll find a clerk who speaks a beautiful Yiddish. In the police station there’s a Jewish captain who also speaks good Yiddish. And what neighborhood sends a socialist assemblyman to Albany? Brownsville. There’s even a Hasidic rebbe, over whose…
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Is Trump Attacking CNN Because of Grudge Against Jewish CEO?
Jeff Zucker, President of CNN, just can’t catch a break. (Not that he necessarily deserves one, given CNN’s long history of blunders, from mistaking a dildo covered flag for an ISIS flag, to falsely reporting the arrest of the Boston bombers, to Don Lemon suggesting the missing Malaysia Air flight MH370 may have been swallowed into…
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Finding a Jewish Homeland — Just Northwest of Buffalo
Isra Isle By Nava Semel, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen Mandel Vilar Press, 240 pages, $16.95 The boom in Jewish alternate history continues. Following on the heels of Lavie Tidhar’s novel, “A Man Lies Dreaming” (about Adolf Hitler failing to become the Führer of Nazi Germany), Emily Barton’s “The Book of Esther” (about…
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The Secret Jewish History of the Doomsday Clock
In 2017, contention for the title of the day’s worst piece of news is tight. Is it the portent of a coming crackdown on voting rights? The felony charges for 6 reporters covering protests of President Donald Trump’s inauguration? (Ok, that was earlier this week, but still.) The doubling of membership fees at exclusive clubs…
Most Popular
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Culture You can buy Sukkot gift boxes that say ‘tuchus’ on Amazon
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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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Film & TV Netflix finally gave Jews our Hot Rabbi. Too bad every other Jew in the show sucks
In Case You Missed It
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Oct. 7: One Year Later Helpless and horrified: An oral history of 5 Jews in America on Oct. 7, 2023
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Opinion I study the relationship between Zionism and Judaism. Oct. 7 may have changed it forever
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Fast Forward Shofars blown along Ukrainian frontlines as part of Rosh Hashanah initiative for soldiers
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Fast Forward 8 Israeli troops killed in Lebanon in first Israeli casualties of ground invasion
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