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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How my odious cousin Roy Cohn was responsible for creating Donald Trump — and me
For this author, 'The Apprentice' is a chillingly accurate film that hits way too close to home
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What Arnold Wesker Talked About When He Talked About Jerusalem
Arnold Wesker, the British Jewish playwright who died on April 12 at age 83, might have been the most ardent explorer of the kibbutz ethos in English theatrical history. In his explicitly back-to-the-land play, “I’m Talking about Jerusalem” (1960), Ada Kahn, daughter of the Jewish family featured in an earlier play, “Chicken Soup with Barley,”…
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Bob Dylan’s Childhood Pal To Write Memoir
Louie Kemp, Bob Dylan’s childhood best friend who has maintained a close relationship with Dylan throughout their lives, will write “The Boys from the North Country: My Life with Robert Zimmerman and Bob Dylan,” for Random House, according to Publisher’s Marketplace. Author-musician Kinky Friedman, also a longtime Dylan friend and associate, will co-write the book…
The Latest
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EXCLUSIVE: Listen to The Song Allen Ginsberg Wrote For His Father
Although the voice is definitely familiar, the genre is definitely not. Could that possibly be the late Allen Ginsberg, talk-singing while accompanied by horn and guitar? In fact, it is. In conjunction with the release of the 3 CD box set “The Last Word On First Blues” released by Omnivore Recordings, the Forward presents the…
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Why Anti-Semitic Propaganda Seems Oddly Relevant Today
Given the vitriolic speech surrounding the current presidential campaign, the “Anti-Semitism 1919-1939” exhibit at The New York Historical Society that opened April 11, seems ominously well timed. “You can’t accept this as a fringe area,” said Kenneth Rendell, the founder and director of The Museum of World War II in Boston, who curated the exhibit,…
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Something’s Missing From Edgar Bronfman’s Book on Judaism
Why Be Jewish? A Testament By Edgar M. Bronfman Twelve Books, 256 pages, $26 Edgar M. Bronfman found his Judaism late in his life, and embraced it as if he were making up for lost time. As he aged, he learned more and did more, developing a personal rationale for his beliefs and behaviors, and…
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What Ever Became of the ‘Children of Jerusalem’?
Between 1991 and 1996, seven Israeli and Palestinian children starred in a Canadian documentary series about life in Jerusalem. Though they grew up within miles of one another, they lived worlds apart, never to meet. A quarter-century later, I set out to find them. I learned about the obscure series, called “Children of Jerusalem,” from…
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What You Shouldn’t Expect When You’re Expecting (and Jewish)
The 20-week ultrasound, the one where you get to see the most detailed image yet of your baby-to-be, is, for many, a time of exquisite exhilaration and wonder at the feat of physics that can capture the contours of your roughly 9-ounce bundle of joy. But as I lay on the table, watching brain quadrants…
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Art At the Jewish Museum’s Mizrahi Exhibit, a Missed Opportunity
Many years ago, my colleague Maurice Berger and I proposed an exhibition on fashion and the Jews to the powers-that-be at the Jewish Museum. Nothing came of it, save countless meetings and drafts and redrafts of our proposal. The project was shelved. I was delighted, then, to learn of “Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History,” an…
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Film & TV After All These Years, Are These Movies Still Funny?
The first time I remember being overwhelmed with laughter in a movie theater was when Peter Sellers, as Inspector Jacques Clouseau in “The Return of the Pink Panther,” went airborne with a slow-motion karate kick that sailed over the head of sidekick Cato (Burt Kwouk), through a door and into the mayhem of crashing shelves…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Defense lawyers for Manhattan Lower East Side resident Abraham Rotman called for a retrial after the jury found the defendant guilty of murdering Saul Jacobs by stabbing him on the corner of Eldridge and Stanton streets. Rotman, who was walking with a woman on Stanton Street when the murder took place,…
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When a Holocaust Memoir Becomes a Ghost Story
But You Did Not Come Back: A Memoir By Marceline Loridan-Ivens Translated by Sandra Smith Atlantic Monthly Press, 112 pages, $22 In 2015, more than 7,000 French Jews immigrated to Israel. A Jewish agency think tank began planning for 120,000 more, roughly a quarter of all the Jews in France. Jewish schoolchildren increasingly cannot attend…
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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Yiddish ווי האָבן ייִדן געהיט די ייִדיש־קולטור אױף יענער זײַט „אײַזערנעם פֿאָרהאַנג“?How did Jews maintain their Yiddish culture behind the Iron Curtain?
ייִדישע ליטעראַטן, װאָס האָבן געטרײַ געדינט די קאָמוניסטישע רעזשימען, האָבן גענוצט זײערע פּריװילעגיעס כּדי אָפּצוהיטן ייִדיש.
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Fast Forward All the Jewish NHL players to watch in the 2024-2025 season
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Opinion A two-state solution may seem like a distant dream. Here’s why it shouldn’t be
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Opinion I’m a Holocaust survivor. Here’s why I celebrated my 80th birthday protesting at an Israeli prison
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