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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1,000-Year-Old ‘Afghan Genizah’ Offers Window on Lost World of Silk Road Jews
The National Library of Israel has purchased the “Afghan Genizah” collection brought to Israel by Israeli antiquities dealer Lenny Wolfe some 10 months ago. The collection includes about 250 documents, most from the 11th century, and were most likely discovered in a cave in northern Afghanistan. About 100 of the manuscripts probably came from the…
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Film & TV ‘High Maintenance’ Is an Elegy for a Dying Profession
It’s ironic that “High Maintenance,” a new HBO series about a New York City pot dealer, appears just as its subject is about to become a thing of the past. As marijuana legalization spreads across the country, buying weed will soon be no sketchier than getting frozen yogurt. But even if “High Maintenance” is a…
The Latest
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Mordecai Richler Gets a Mural in Montreal — And His Son Approves
Mordecai Richler has always been a larger-than-life presence in Montreal. Now, that’s literally the case. The City of Montreal has unveiled an official mural dedicated to the late author, who captured the city’s singular Jewish character — and skewered its often surreal language politics — in potent essays and canonical novels like “The Apprenticeship of…
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10 Overlooked Jewish Films That You Can Stream For Free Right Now
The Internet is filled with oddities and lost gems. We took a dive into YouTube and found that some of the most interesting Jewish films are out there. And you can watch them right now. 1) The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz Ted Kotcheff’s 1974 screen adaptation of Mordechai Richler’s classic coming-of-age novel starred a young…
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Happy 100th Birthday to Roald Dahl — Beloved Author and Vile Anti-Semite
Born on September 13, 1916, Roald Dahl, the beloved author of “Matilda” and “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” would have turned 100 today. It’s an anniversary we mark with admiration and a bit of uncertainty as well. For, aside from his brilliant imaginaton and wicked sense of humor, Dahl was also something of an…
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Why Isn’t Frederick Kiesler a Household Name?
A paradox lies at the core of Frederick Kiesler’s legacy. Over a career that spanned half a century, the protean and tireless architect, designer and theoretician actually built precious little. His most famous and, arguably, most radical design, the free-form pod-like “Endless House,” never yielded a satisfactory prototype, despite nearly 40 years of planning; few…
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The Jewish Museum in a Town With Only One Jew In It
From Berlin to Moscow; London to Vienna; Copenhagen, Denmark, to Budapest, Hungary, and, recently, Warsaw, Poland, the map of Europe is dotted with museums dedicated to the history and culture of Jewish communities past and present. Although the Jewish Museum in Prague dates back to 1906, the majority of Jewish museums now on a Jewish…
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Why Dead Languages Like Akkadian Still Matter
I grew up hearing the Code of Hammurabi read out loud, in Akkadian, at the dining-room table. I did not know that my graduate-student mother was one of Akkadian’s few regular readers. The language of the ancient Akkad region, or modern-day Iraq, is considered a “dead language,” just like Ugaritic and Phoenician. All these dead…
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How in the World Did Cuneiform Cookies Become a Thing?
Cuneiform cookies? Yes, they are a thing. Though it has been centuries since Akkadian was spoken, cuneiform writing has had an unexpected burst of popularity as a cookie decoration. The idea started with Katy Blanchard, the Fowler/Van Santvoord Keeper of the Near Eastern Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in…
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How To Say Kaddish For Your Father in 7 Different Cities
Just over a month ago, my dearly beloved father, Dr. Stephen S. Kutner z”l, passed away, right before my family and I had planned to take a complicated three-week East Coast road trip. After sitting shiva we decided to go through with the trip. And as a Jew mourning an immediate family member, that meant…
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Keeping Up With the Cohens
People collect, display and hang on to stuff for all sorts of reasons. Either they relish the thrill of acquisition, enjoy the company of their things or see them as a hedge against invisibility. What people collect is equally as varied as their motivations. Some lovingly assemble a collection of rocks, others pile up photographs…
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 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
In Case You Missed It
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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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