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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How a Suicidal Dog Led a Writer to a Nobel Prize
Pedigree By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 144 Pages, $25 After the Circus By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 216 pages, $16 Paris Nocturne By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 160 pages, $16 In his recollection of his first 21 years, the Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano writes that, apart from his younger brother, Rudy,…
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The Secret Jewish History of Nostradamus
This July 2 will mark the 450th anniversary of the death of Nostradamus (1503–1566), the French apothecary and supposed seer of Jewish origin. Born Michel de Nostredame in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, his most famous work was “The Prophecies,” a collection of four-line texts that purported to tell the future. A recent translation by Richard Sieburth reminds…
The Latest
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How Richard Linklater’s ‘Everybody Wants Some’ Celebrates Bullying
Because I live in Austin, it’s hard to have perspective on a Richard Linklater movie. Linklater occupies a position in the cultural hierarchy here only slightly behind Willie Nelson. Every time he releases a film, it gets celebrated like a civic holiday. So when I say something like, “I enjoyed “Boyhood” pretty well but I…
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Brilliant ‘Crucible’ Returns to Broadway With Gripping Message for Age of Trump
“The indigenous American berserk,” Philip Roth called it. He was writing about the violent, calamitous antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s, when the center would not hold, when prosperous, placid Swede Levov, the Newark businessman at the center of Roth’s “American Pastoral,” saw his idyllic life upended by a beloved daughter who went the way…
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Can Jeremiah’s Missive of Love Survive in the Age of Emojis?
Newly engaged, Rachel was visiting her grandparents in Indianapolis. It was a cold Sunday morning, and the family was getting ready for a Colts game. Rushing to get to the stadium, everyone was looking for a bag in which to carry hats and sweaters. Rachel spotted what looked like a usable sack on the top…
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Why Was This Humble Jewish Shoemaker Asked To Join the Ku Klux Klan?
A midsummer rainstorm shot streaks of lightning over the tobacco fields. It had been tough to find a place to pull over to eat our lunch on the shoulderless state highway, so we idled in the parking lot behind a plantation house. I was driving with my family back to Raleigh, North Carolina, from the…
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Remembering the Indomitable Jewish Spirit of Imre Kertész
The Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész, who died on March 31 at age 86, was ferociously uncompromising in his identity as a Jewish writer. In novels such as “Fatelessness,” (1975) expressing his experiences as a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as well as “Dossier K: A Memoir,” (2006) an unfettered self-interview, Kertész situated himself in…
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100 Years Later, a Cinematic Time Capsule Is Opened
Movies — so thought a strain of film scholars famously led by Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer — are best seen as captured reality. Momentary history seized in amber. Aesthetics aside, it’s hard to argue, given how much human history in the past 125 years would’ve been lost to our eyes had it not been…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago When New York City police busted a ring of African-American thieves on 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, one of the arrestees was identified as Robert Lelly. But when Lelly was put in front of a judge, he declared that he was actually a white Jew by the name of…
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Why Hank Greenberg Never Became a New York Yankee
Hall of Fame baseball player Hank Greenberg grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium yet never played for his hometown Yankees. Why not? The Yankees did in fact pursue the young prospect. Paul Krichell, the scout famous for discovering Lou Gehrig, recognized another raw talent in Greenberg and figured — as the New York…
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Family, Faith, Food and Other Keys to Becoming the World’s Oldest Man
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. One day shortly after the outbreak of World War I, when Yisrael Kristal was a child, word spread throughout his hometown of Zarnow, about fifty miles from Lodz, that Emperor Franz Joseph was visiting a nearby town. The boy, along with a group of Jews from his…
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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