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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In Berlin, A Remembrance of Synagogues Past
How do you take a walk down memory lane if you don’t have any memories of your own? That’s what I was asking myself on September 11 of this year, when the United States was commemorating the 15th anniversary of a great domestic tragedy and I was in Berlin, participating in yet another attempt to…
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Why Sukkot Is the Most Magical Holiday of All
‘I can’t wait for Sukkot.” An expression of anticipatory excitement coming from a fellow member of my temple? Our rabbi? My Orthodox cousins? It was the 13-year-old son of our non-Jewish neighbors. And another piece of evidence of a remarkable phenomenon our family has discovered about the holiday: That it is magic. No, it’s not…
The Latest
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The Secret Jewish History of the NBC Peacock
“Why would anybody be interested in my mishegas?” Larry Pomerance is 82 and still smokes. He sits on a windy terrace eating a bialy. I’ve known Larry for eight years and I can say without qualification that what he terms “mishegas” is funny and worth sharing. Not that I didn’t have to practically pull teeth…
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That Time My Father Met Albert Einstein
Around the end of the 1940s, Albert Einstein needed surgery and decided to have it done at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. My family used Brooklyn Jewish because my father’s older brother Will was attending physician in Ob/Gyn there. He delivered me and my sister there. My father was there for a hemorrhoidectomy. In those days, hospitals…
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Chicago Mercantile Exchange Chair Leo Melamed Stars in His Son’s Movie
CHICAGO — For many years, the name Leo Melamed has been virtually synonymous with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Melamed first ventured onto the trading floor in the 1950s as a law student working as a runner. The CME, when Melamed joined it, operated under the open outcry system of traders and brokers communicating through shouts…
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Why the Tallit Is Making a Comeback
Funny how it takes a kerfuffle to get people thinking about what they wear, especially within the precincts of the sanctuary. In the wake of Donald Trump’s donning a prayer shawl, or tallit, while visiting an African-American church in September, I, like many of you, took to the Internet to learn more. Was the wearing…
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WATCH: Steven Sondheim Revisits One of His Most Brilliant Failures
One of the highlights of the recent New York Film Festival was the premiere of Lonny Price’s documentary “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened,” which goes behind the scenes of one of Broadway’s most legendary failures, “Merrily We Roll Along,” directed by Harold Prince with a score by Steven Sondheim. Though Sondheim’s score…
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Did Radical Politics Undercut the Work of This Brilliant Photographer?
Louis Stettner, the American Jewish photographer who died on October 13 at age 93, produced images governed by Socialist ideals to the point where a full understanding of his creative personality requires looking at his works in other media. After early inspiration to take up photography by encounters with such talents as Alfred Steiglitz and…
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In a Catholic Town, a Tribute and Reunion For Poland’s Jews
I came to Poland for the opening of a new Jewish museum in Czestochowa, and found myself participating in a four-day “reunion,” as it was called, though most of the 125 participants seemed to be meeting for the first time. They were, almost all of them, Jews from Israel, the U.S., and other countries whose…
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Why Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan Has a Yiddish Soul
It was not two days ago that I was making a point in a private e-mail in which I reached for this example from the pen of the newest Nobel Laureate for Literature: “Time and love has branded me with its claws/Had to go to Florida/Dodging them Georgia laws/Poor Boy in a hotel called The…
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What Did Alan Greenspan ‘Know’?
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Alan Greenspan has been many things to many people. In monetary policy, he was the patron saint of central bankers or a sinner who brought about the global financial crisis, depending who made the assessment and when. In life, he was a…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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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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Opinion With killing of Hezbollah’s chief, Israel occupies the inarguable moral high ground
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Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
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Film & TV How Leonard Cohen — and a Yom Kippur prayer — inspired a coming-of-age epic
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Opinion A year after Oct. 7, Israel has the chance to remake its future — for better or worse
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Opinion Campus protests defined the year since Oct. 7. Could they actually change U.S. policy?
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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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