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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Was Jill Stein’s Recount Always Destined For Spectacular Failure?
Well, in perhaps the least surprising news of the week, Jill Stein’s recount has come to an inconsequential end. You may remember that back in November, Stein and the Green Party filed for election recounts in three states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Of the three, only Wisconsin actually ended up conducting a recount. The results?…
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Did Kanye and Trump Trade Jewish Gossip — or Just Say ‘L’Chaim’?
Rapper Kanye West paid a visit to Trump Tower on Tuesday to visit with the man he told an audience recently he would have voted for had he voted on Election Day. Two days after that concert, on November 21, the hip-hop superstar cancelled his remaining concerts and was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital,…
The Latest
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Jake Gyllenhaal to Headline ‘Sunday in the Park With George’ Broadway Revival
It’s been a good year for Stephen Sondheim: a new musical in the works, a documentary reviving his brilliant flop “Merrily We Roll Along,” and now a star-studded revival of one of his best-loved shows, “Sunday in the Park with George,” which will have a 10 week run on Broadway this spring. The production, which…
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Music WATCH: Israel Singer Aviv Geffen’s Hebrew Version of Dylan’s ‘Hard Rain’
Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan’s music has enduring power; this past weekend, Patti Smith moved the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony audience to tears while singing his classic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” The song has also moved hearts and minds in Hebrew. In 2000, Israeli bard Aviv Geffen, seen as the protest musician of his generation,…
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Reclaiming Art Lost in the Holocaust is About to Become Much Easier
70 years after the end of World War II, Holocaust survivors and their families are still fighting to reclaim art stolen from them by the Nazis. For survivors in the United States, that fight is poised to become somewhat easier. This past week, both the House and Senate passed a bill that, if signed into…
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The Time I Almost Saw Walt Disney Vomit
In Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s interview with Sam Adams, a former Hollywood errand boy-turned-dealmaker, Adams turns to Shapiro and asks her if he ever told her about the time that he saw Walt Disney nearly vomit. She asks him to elaborate and, well, here’s the rest of the story: “One day when I was at the…
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Do You Think Differently When You Write in Another Language?
One afternoon, when I was 22, I nervously asked my boss if I could attend a French writing workshop at the Alliance Française each week — during work hours. It was my first job out of college, and I worked as a copy editor at a daily financial newspaper covering the municipal-bond market. I was…
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How I Converted to Yiddish
People often ask me: “What made you want to learn Yiddish if you aren’t even Jewish? Why convert to Judaism, when we, Jews, have so much trouble?” It’s hard for me to give a simple answer that summarizes my love for the Yiddish language or my eagerness to bond with the Jewish people. I was…
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It’s Trump’s America — and the Era of the Pitchforks Has Just Begun
The morning of November 9, nobody in my subway car was looking at each other. Normally, avoidance of eye contact is a gesture of civility, the way New Yorkers grant each other pockets of mental space when physical space is scarce. And normally, a moment of mutual acknowledgment precedes the retreat into aloofness. The morning…
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Meet Sam Adams — Humphrey Bogart’s Assistant and I.B. Singer’s Dealmaker
I met retired Hollywood film and literary agent Sam Adams while I was on a research trip for my forthcoming book. When I introduced myself, he was reading a dog-eared copy of perhaps the greatest of true Antarctic tales, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s “The Worst Journey in the World.” Sam, now just shy of his 90th birthday,…
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Chaos In Brooklyn: Pirate Radio Teaches Torah, Picks Fight With Classical Music Station
Pirate radio — broadcasting on FM, AM, or short-wave radio without a license — sounds kind of sexy. It certainly looked sexy in 2009’s wonderful “Pirate Radio” — see Bill Nighy, below, if you doubt me — and realistically, it probably used to be sexy. Those days, my friends, are done. What robbed pirate radio…
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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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
In Case You Missed It
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Special Report At the kibbutz hit hardest on Oct. 7, a wrenching debate over how to rebuild
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Opinion Oct. 7 changed Israel. A year later, it must change American Jews, too
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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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