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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New Exhibit on Jewish Postcards Set To Open at The Museum on Eldridge Street
The Museum at Eldridge Street, located inside a National Historic Landmark 19th century synagogue, has an interesting exhibition coming up next week – and it couldn’t come at a better time. The exhibition, which is being put on in conjuction with the Blavatnik Archive Foundation (“a non-profit foundation dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of primary…
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How I Reunited My Holocaust Survivor Father With His Long Lost Neighbor
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Jerzy “Jurek” Skarżyński had been up half the night. The next day he was going to meet the daughter and grandson of a Jewish man who once lived in Uchanie, his home village, and his mind would not slow down. Jurek, a Polish Christian, had not spoken…
The Latest
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Heirs of German Jewish Art Dealer File Lawsuit Against Bavaria
Another day, another lawsuit against the German government for art stolen by the Nazis. Per a New York Times report, the heirs of German-Jewish art dealer and collector Alfred Flechtheim, sued the German state of Bavaria on Monday, saying that it has consistently refused to return works of art that the plaintiffs assert were stolen…
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Forward Looking Back
100 Years Ago Jews in Manhattan’s Harlem are in fear after a terrible murder of a Jewish woman took place in her apartment on 101st Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. The victim, Rosa Zemkin, was found by her husband, who works in a tailor shop. When he came home at 7 p.m., he found…
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Could a Song Save the World? And Other Things That Make Us Go ‘Ugh!’
If everyone in the world were a classical musician, we’d long ago have made peace in the Middle East. That’s a realization I had in the early 2000s, reading in the Times about yet another youth orchestra for Israeli and Palestinian prodigies — or maybe it was a chess program for Jewish and Muslim grandmasters…
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50 Years Later, Israel’s Basketball Hero Tal Brody Remembers His Glory Days
It’s been almost 50 years, but people still stop Tal Brody on the streets of Israel and shake his hand. Or they wave and smile from a distance, all hoping to make contact with a national hero. Brody helped snap the country out of its deep funk following the 1972 Olympic Massacre and the 1973…
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Harold Prince Produced Broadway Musicals — Now He’s the Subject of One
If you love “West Side Story,” “”Cabaret,” or “Sweeney Todd,” you love Harold Prince: the theatrical producer and director collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on each of those beloved shows. That’s not enough to convince you? He also produced the original “Fiddler on the Roof,” directed and co-conceived the 1998 dramatization of Leo Frank’s trial and…
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New Jewish Literary Journal Pays Tribute to Vilna Ghetto Heroes
The first volume of the Jewish Book Council’s new annual literary journal, Paper Brigade, isn’t exactly subtle in its messaging: its cover, designed by Katherine Messenger, features sketches of an attractive set of bookish people utterly lost in Jewish literature. They seem to occupy a bubble of calmness. One woman sits absorbed in Anita Diamant’s…
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Why Michael Chabon’s New Novel Made Me Gasp
Michael Chabon’s new novel, “Moonglow,” initially presents itself as a fairly straightforward memoir. And yet complications abound from the get-go, as one might expect from a writer who has done more than most to complicate what genre works can do and be and how they might be critically received. (An author’s note also suggests that…
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‘Mozart in the Jungle,’ An Italian Jewish Celebration, and 5 Other Things to Watch, Read, and Do This Weekend
Hanukkah is coming, which means, for many, some serious winter nesting. Before you huddle up for the holiday, partake in some of the last best moments of Jewish culture in 2016. 1) Binge on theater, new and old This week and next herald the openings of Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Greenberg’s new play “The Babylon…
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Meet Rachel Chavkin, Director of Broadway Smash ‘The Comet’
The shining shifting spectacle “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” is playing at the aptly titled Imperial Theater starring Josh Groban and directed by Rachel Chavkin. “The Comet” (as it is colloquially known), by Dave Malloy, is one of the most exciting electro rock operas to hit Broadway in recent years. Based on…
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