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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Yes, Patti Smith Really Did Sing ‘Yentl’ at MoMA!
Singer and writer Patti Smith made a surprise appearance at MoMA on Sunday, December 18th, delighting visitors both tipped-off and caught unawares. As The New York Times’ Jonah Engel Bromwich reported, Smith’s performance, during which she read a selection of her poems and performed four songs, was her latest in a string of near-yearly tributes…
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How an Okie Named Woody Guthrie Became Our Best Hanukkah Tunesmith
For 20 years, I was a pop music critic. Every year as the calendar wound down, here came one of music journalism’s over-roasted chestnuts: the annual roundup of new Christmas albums. I never groaned. I’m one of those Christmas music people. As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is down my gullet, I’m trotting out the…
The Latest
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Check Out 8 of the Greatest Jewish Christmas Albums of All Time
Eydie Gormé and the Trio Los Panchos — Navidad Means Christmas Steve Lawrence’s better half went south of the border for this festive 1966 collection of Spanish-language Christmas songs. David Grisman — Acoustic Christmas Folk/jazz mandolinist Grisman and his string band serve up swinging instrumental renditions of secular and traditional Christmas carols on this 1983…
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Is America a More Ignorant Country Than Israel?
A week ago, Ipsos MORI, a market research company based in London, released their 2016 Index of Ignorance, which purportedly measures the level of ignorance in 40 countries from around the world. Ipsos MORI gathered their data from a survey taken by 27,250 people – between 500 and 1000 in each of the countries tested. The…
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How Klezmer Music Refutes Richard Wagner’s Myth of Racial Purity
The art world has always been a bastion of globalism, with artists constantly borrowing from one another to create new, previously inconceivable works. In our increasingly anti-globalist, anti-immigrant time, it is important to remember that many of the artistic works that we hold dear would not have been possible without centuries of cultural exchange. Few…
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Is Dr. Heimlich’s Maneuver All It Was Cracked Up To Be?
Dr. Henry Heimlich: Were his Maneuvers Beneficial or Misbegotten? Some doctors help humanity, although not always in the manner they intended. Dr. Henry Judah Heimlich, the American Jewish thoracic surgeon who died on Saturday, December 17, at age 96, entered popular culture through his much-publicized Heimlich Maneuver, or abdominal thrusts to stop choking. The lifesaving…
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Why David Friedman Is So Wrong To Call J Street Liberals ‘Kapos’
Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has called Jews with left-leaning political views “far worse than kapos.” It’s a highly-charged word, to say the least, and discussion of Friedman’s word choice — kapoim in Hebrew — is blaring from the radio on Israeli buses. I heard a radio host explain Friedman’s use…
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After Aleppo, It’s Time To Stop Saying ‘Never Again’
What do we mean when we say “never again?” These days, do we mean anything at all? Perhaps when the phrase was coined in 1961 by filmmaker Erwin Leiser in his Holocaust documentary, “Mein Kampf,” we might have been able to salvage some semblance of a stance from the words. We had yet to experience…
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Just How Safe Will We Be in Donald Trump’s America?
T he day after the Election I was supposed to give a reading at a small private college. Normally I enjoy giving readings, and I’d been looking forward to this one. But on that particular morning, I didn’t want to leave the house. I didn’t want to face a world that was, apparently, so full…
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Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Hollywood Starlet Who Pointedly Forgot Her Jewish Roots
Jewish tradition indicates that eulogies should not be over-effusive, lest the undeserving deceased be judged all the more strictly in the next world. This problem arises afresh in the case of Zsa Zsa Gabor, who died on December 18 at age 99. Zsa Zsa (surely we can call her that in death as in life)…
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Why the Revolution Must Be Televised in Donald Trump’s America
To: Revolutionary Resistance Committee (Ethan Allen Division) From: Arun Chaudhary, Creative Director (Frederick Douglass Division) Re: Towards a Fourth Cinema – Materialist Tribalism in the Post-Enlightenment Counterfactual Trumpian Age Terry, It has become clear to even the most dim folks in our research department that the Trump presidency represents nothing less than the end of…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Opinion With killing of Hezbollah’s chief, Israel occupies the inarguable moral high ground
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Culture A Jewish prophet of the 1980s would be horrified to see that we didn’t heed his warnings
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Culture You can buy Sukkot gift boxes that say ‘tuchus’ on Amazon
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