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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POEM: Kedusha (Zeh Lazeh)
המשרתים…נותנים באהבה רשות זה לזה להקדיש ליוצרם… — Shacharit liturgy I can’t see ghosts by myself. I need help, from partner or stranger, like once when I lay awake with a friend in a cabin in Connecticut and we told each other about each creak, how we would put salt on the sills tomorrow because…
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Watch Frum March To Protest Sabbath-Violating Teens in Lakewood
Lakewood, New Jersey, is a bustling Haredi town organized around its grand yeshiva and dominated by strict rabbinic authority. So when a few rebellious teenagers took to hanging out by the lake on Sabbath afternoons — violating Sabbath rules by smoking and using their cellphones — the yeshiva’s head rabbis gathered dozens of men to march…
The Latest
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Meet the Rapping Rabbi of Seattle
Simon Benzaquen, a Seattle rabbi, first earned fame as the “Rapping Rabbi” for his recordings and performances with rapper Nissim in 2013, but he has since found a way to use the same music to further one of his personal passions: preserving the Ladino language. In an effort to ensure that the language of Sephardic…
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What an Ex-Hasid Can Teach You About Dating
Israel Irenstein is trying to explain chemistry. Neatly dressed in a grey suit and closely cropped hair, the 37-year-old dating coach stands before his all-female audience and addresses a young woman in the front row who is perplexed by a recent rejection. It had been a great first date. They laughed, they talked for hours,…
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Film & TV What If ‘Mad Max’ Were Jewish?
My name is Max Stein. My world is reduced to a single instinct: Survive. Well, that and find a decent mechanic. Who knew that maintaining a killer muscle car would be such a pain in the tuchus? If you know anyone reliable, please tell me. My current guy is a big overcharger. Also, he is…
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Film & TV A Grim New Woody Allen Film Debuts at Cannes
After the earnest entreaties of Emmanuelle Bercot’s “Standing Tall,” the French social drama about at-risk youth that opened the festival, and the dystopian provocations of Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Lobster,” the mood at Cannes changed palpably when Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man” unspooled out-of-competition, injecting some adrenalin and existential angst (not to mention star power) into a…
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Remembering Robert Wistrich, Anti-Semitism’s Dauntless Foe
Robert Solomon Wistrich, who died in Rome on May 19 of a heart attack at age 70, was more than an eminent historian of anti-Semitism. As Neuburger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and head of its Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Wistrich drew on…
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Film & TV A Jewish ‘Ulysses’ at the Cannes Film Festival
It’s the 68th installment of the world’s most glamorous film festival, and thousands of filmmakers, actors, movie execs, journalists, tourists and adoring fans have descended on this small, surprisingly unremarkable town along the French Riviera, a town whose name is synonymous with cinema. Last Wednesday, the International Jury headed by the American directing duo The…
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How I Moved to L.A. Without Leaving New York While Becoming and Not Becoming a Father
The following essay appears in the forthcoming anthology “CHOICES: Why I Decided To Get Married Or Not And Have Children Or Not And Also I Am Half-White Or All-White Or Not White At All And May Or May Not Be Jewish.” The other day, as i sat on a bench at the park drinking wine…
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HomeLands: Building a Life Together
Kate Groob, 30, is an architect and project manager at Thomas A. Fenniman Architect, a restoration architecture firm in Manhattan. Her husband, Jason Groob, 32, is a data analyst at Sunday Sky, a data-driven video startup. They reside on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and have been living together for 6 years and their dog Baumer,…
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Natalie Portman Says Directing Debut Was Challenge
Natalie Portman played a ballerina in the grip of psychological trauma in “Black Swan,” but the Israeli actress said she had lots of support while directing her first film, about the childhood of Israeli intellectual Amos Oz, shown in Cannes. Portman both directs and stars in “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” based on Oz’s…
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Culture How my odious cousin Roy Cohn was responsible for creating Donald Trump — and me
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