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 Marlon Brando Became Godfather to the Jews
Shortly into “Listen to Me Marlon,” a fascinating new documentary about Marlon Brando spoken almost completely in his own voice, comes a startling glimpse of Brando’s life-changing plunge into the Jewish experience of the 20th century. Drawn largely from diaristic audio tapes he made, combined with a wide range of cinematic imagery, the ruminations start…
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Why I Donated My Eggs at 21
‘When you turn 21, then you can do what you want,” my mother said over and over again. While most of my friends were counting down for tattoos and piercings that would “make the neighbors talk,” I was waiting for the day I would be able to help a couple have a baby. I still…
The Latest
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Where We Found Respite From Discrimination
No sooner have we taken our summer vacation than some of us have begun to plan the next one. Where we go and what we see are determined by any number of factors, from the flexibility of our calendars to the elasticity of our budgets. One thing, though, that no longer affects our choice of…
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Blowing the Shofar in Cairo
‘Have you ever prepared a Jewish body for burial?” It was Saturday morning, April 13, 2013. The person on the line had called me hours earlier to let me know that Carmen Weinstein, leader of Cairo’s Jewish community, had died. I had arrived in Cairo nearly eight months earlier to work at the U.S. Embassy,…
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Music How Michael Alpert Brought Klezmer Into the 21st Century
The scent of herring; owlish spectacles; dusty, tragedy-laden archives; scratchy vinyl records you wouldn’t want your friends to know about — these are the things one sometimes associates with Yiddish culture. For more than three decades, Michael Alpert has worked hard on preserving and reviving an Eastern European Jewish tradition that is precisely the opposite…
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Music Soundtrack of Our Spirit: The Podcast
Readers have been calling and emailing us, asking for a podcast version of our playlist so they can listen to it in yet more situations — even on those infrequent occasions when they can’t stream the playlist from here. So we heard you and put together a single podcast with our top five songs and…
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Patrick Stewart Bluntly Channels a Jewish Writer’s Sensibility
I don’t know if “Blunt Talk,” the new comedy on Starz starring Patrick Stewart as a disaster-prone news anchor, is any good. But I do know that I like it. The show is strange and manic, and has a lot of witty lines about the Falklands War. It also has weak dialogue and contrived plot…
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Film & TV Theo Bikel Sang ‘Hava Nagila’ During a Hijacking, And Other Stories From Sue Mengers’ Epic Life
Did you cry during “Love Story”? Sing along to “Funny Girl”? Swoon over “The Way We Were”? For that, and a lot more, you can thank Sue Mengers. Before this badass lady came along, talent agents were basically baby-sitters to the stars: you tried to keep them in line, and if that failed, you prayed…
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Jonathan Franzen’s Moral Hazard
Purity By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $28 In 1969, after having written two earnestly serious novels that scrutinized the morality of his times in stately elegant prose, Philip Roth wrote “Portnoy’s Complaint.” A bawdy riff on sex and the impossibility of living up to the expectations of overbearing mothers, it reads…
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Three’s Company on the Upper East Side
'Personally, I love preparing for Friday night dinner,' said novelist Nicole Dweck.
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A Letter From the Editor: Efsharoot/Possibility
You may be familiar with the journal Sh’ma, first published in 1970 by the liberal theologian Eugene Borowitz and in continuous publication ever since. You may be surprised to find this Sh’ma insert in the Forward. In surprise, we hope you will find possibility. What you hold in your hand is a link between Sh’ma’s…
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