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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Can Tel Aviv ‘Library of Stuff’ Ease Israel’s Epic Clutter?
Talya Galam had a problem familiar to many in Tel Aviv: she wanted to have people over but had nowhere to seat them. Her cramped apartment in South Tel Aviv’s Yad Eliyahu neighborhood was too small for a regular dining table. So Galam bought a folding table. But by solving one problem, she created another…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Torah Scrolls Cut Up and Returned The congregants of the Ahavas Achim Synagogue in New Bedford, Massachusetts, are roiling with fury. Anger reached a peak with the discovery of six desecrated Torah scrolls. Because the scrolls were cut up and then returned to their places in the ark, it is suspected…
The Latest
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Remembering Broadway Theater Impresario James Nederlander
James M. Nederlander, the American Jewish theater impresario who died on July 25 at age 94, was more than just a producer and theater owner in New York and Chicago. Growing up in Detroit, Nederlander, known in the theatrical world as Jimmy, honed his showbiz smarts by studying such star performers as Ed Wynn (born…
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Remembering Marni Nixon, the Greatest Ghost Singer
Marni Nixon, who died on July 24 at 86, was more than just the off-screen dubbed singing voice for unmusical actresses in such Hollywood movies as “The King and I,” “West Side Story,” and “My Fair Lady.” A marriage with the screen composer Ernest Gold (born Ernst Goldner), who wrote the soundtrack music to “Exodus,”…
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What Rembrandt Painted When He Painted Jews
Prior to 1629, when the 23-year-old Rembrandt painted “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” the scene, the culmination of the biblical episode long associated with anti-Semitism that has come to epitomize greediness and selling out, had been treated only a handful of times in art. The narrative, which appears only in the book of…
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Here Are the Top 10 New Yiddish Words
The Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, edited by Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath and Paul Glasser, is full not only of familiar words but a smattering of new ones as well. We picked our top ten favorite Yiddish neologisms. Designated Driver = der nikhterer shofer Hate Crime = der sine-farbrekhn Printer = der opdruker Flip-Flops = fingershikh Jabbing Pain =…
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The Secret Jewish History of Stanley Kubrick
For the first time since it embarked on an international tour, “Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition” is showing at a Jewish museum. San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum proves to be an awesome setting for a complicated, Jewish artist whose films continue to entertain, haunt and provoke. Few filmmakers have been parsed, praised and criticized as much…
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Here’s the Only English-Yiddish Dictionary You Need
Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary Edited by Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath and Paul Glasser Dr. Chava Lapin, associate editor Indiana University Press and the League for Yiddish, 856 pages, $60 It isn’t easy being a language without a country. Unlike English, Hebrew and hundreds of other languages that have governments to protect them and nurture their growth, Yiddish has,…
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Logan Lerman’s Journey From Percy Jackson to Philip Roth
Percy Jackson is not dead. He’s in a coma, and not likely to survive — at least in film — but where there’s life, there’s hope. This according to Logan Lerman, the 24-year-old star of the two popular Percy Jackson films, “The Lightning Thief” and “Sea of Monsters.” Since then, Lerman has established himself as…
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Photographer Nan Goldin Dares You To Look
The first moment that really gets me comes when the strains of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” start, Nico’s voice scratching over the already scratched surfaces of the pictures. It’s a little cheesy, maybe, this song about reflecting another’s innermost self laid over a montage of photographed images of people glancing at themselves, but so what?…
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Hillary Clinton’s Chief Strategist Has a Surprisingly Theatrical Jewish Past
Something theatrical is afoot in the Jewish wing of the Democratic party. In March, we learned that Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland — in case you’ve missed the breaking news, he’s still waiting for the Senate to acknowledge his existence — had tried his hand at theater reviewing while he was a student at Harvard….
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 This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
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Fast Forward Meet Lev Kreitman, who brought down Tel Aviv shooter and survived Nova music festival on Oct. 7
In Case You Missed It
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Oct. 7: One Year Later On the eve of this grim anniversary, what we can — and cannot — control
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Fast Forward Antisemitism hits record high in the U.S.; new report shows most-ever incidents in single year
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Culture He founded the Harlem Globetrotters and is the shortest man in the basketball hall of fame. A new book tells his story.
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Oct. 7: One Year Later One year after Oct. 7, a Yom Kippur ritual of communal mourning takes on fresh meaning
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