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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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Forward Looking Back
100 Years Ago Here in America, the Sabbath has become a different experience than it was in the old country, due mainly to the very different circumstances in which Jews find themselves. The same Old World Jews who once kept the Sabbath as something precious have changed their ways, and many of them gave up…
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How Gene Wilder Celebrated the Black-Jewish Alliance in ‘Blazing Saddles’
(JTA) — Last year I joined some 3,000 people at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark for a wide-screen showing of Mel Brooks’ 1974 Western parody “Blazing Saddles.” In the onstage interview that followed, Brooks, then 89, was beside himself in his delight at sharing his 42-year-old comedy with a real live audience….
The Latest
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When Holocaust Survivor Tormented Hitler’s Henchman — as Told to ‘This American Life’
(JTA) — It sounds like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino film. A Holocaust survivor, whose mother and sister were killed in the genocide, said he locked a Nazi prisoner in a shed for three days, made him strip and urinated on his face, “This American Life,” the weekly public radio show, Sunday. “I told him, from…
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The Secret Jewish History of Esperanto
The deadly pogroms that swept through Eastern Europe following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 encouraged some Jews to become socialists, others Zionists, others emigrants. In 1887, Ludwik Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist born in Bialystok and based in Warsaw, Poland, became the inventor of the most widely spoken constructed language, what came to…
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How To Make an Unorthodox Playlist For Your Orthodox Rabbi
A few weeks ago, after Sabbath- morning services at my local Chabad, my spiritual leader, Rabbi Yossi, asked me for a favor: He wanted me to choose 20 songs for him to listen to, secular music with a Jewish vibe. He had recently heard Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fire,” derived from the High Holidays prayer,…
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Yoga Helps Teachers Connect To Jewish Values
Halfway through the 16-day Breathe for Change teacher-training program – on a day called “Breathe for Communication” – 50 teachers sat inside the Speyer School in Manhattan, eager to learn how to “foster deeper relationships.” The teachers assumed crisscross positions, like their own students might do. One woman ate a peanut-butter sandwich from a Ziploc…
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The Earth Moved For Them — Did It Move For You?
The Louisville Jewish Community Center has had a garden for years, but never the staff to make the most of it. For Michael Fraade, a member of the first cohort of Hazon’s JOFEE Fellowship who is spending the year working on the JCC’s environmental programming, that garden has the potential to change the ways in…
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Her Cousin Just Wanted To Pick Some Peaches — What Could Be So Terrible?
I was 8 years old and was standing on the front lawn of my house in Queens with my little sister, who was 4. We were standing under our favorite tree — a peach tree, a glorious, bursting peach tree, laden and heavy with ripe, fuzzy fruit. Lots of times, my sister and I would…
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Jews and Muslims Form Enduring Friendships at Brooklyn Camp
Some of the children who rushed to cool off in the pool on a sunny July morning would not have attended camp together a few years ago. They lived next-door to each other, but their South Brooklyn communities often kept their distance. Now they splash around in the water before lunch, the only traces of…
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In Delmore Schwartz’s Stories, a Reader’s Responsibilities Begin
This month Anne reads: “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” by Delmore Schwartz In the first issue of The Partisan Review in 1935 Delmore Schwartz age 21 published this remarkable short story and was instantly recognized as a writer of unusual quality. The story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is as powerful today as it was at the…
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Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz Wants To Talk Sex Ed, Modern Orthodox Style
Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz is ready to talk frankly with Jewish youth about sex — and he thinks you should be, too. Yanklowitz, a central figure in the Open Orthodoxy movement, has called publicly in workshops, speeches and Op-Eds for comprehensive sex education in Orthodox Jewish schools, including accurate, extensive information about STD/STI prevention, sexual and…
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Opinion My brother-in-law’s kibbutz weathered Oct. 7. Then came the Iranian missile strikes
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Opinion I thought the Dyke March should be open to Zionists. So my fellow New York organizers kicked me out
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