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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Ze’eva Cohen Documents Her Gliding Career at Age 74
Ze’eva Cohen is tidying up her desk. The modern dancer who enjoyed a blaze of celebrity in the 1960s and ‘70s has reached the age where securing her place in history feels more urgent than satisfying a restless impulse to move. It’s too soon to say that she will never autograph another playbill, or smile…
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The Powerful Example Of The Jewish Abolitionists We Forgot
The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States — Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in late January 1865 — comes at an fraught moment in the history of race relations. Considering that black men are being killed by police at the same rate as they were lynched in the era of Jim Crow,…
The Latest
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Why People Leave Orthodoxy — and How
Becoming Un-Orthodox By Lynn Davidman Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $27.95 In “Becoming Un-Orthodox,” a study of ex-Orthodox Jews by University of Kansas professor Lynn Davidman, a woman identified only as “Leah” describes Friday night meals in her parents’ home. “Shabbes was kind of a wash,” she says. “My father was always tired and so…
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Cookbook Collector Savors Recipes for Living in Michigan
For a woman her age, Jan Longone moves incredibly fast when she’s eager to point something out. The 81-year-old with a plump, soft face and fierce eyes direct from yenta central casting demanded that attention be paid to a French guidebook from the 1960s, open to a page with the loopy autograph of the then-up-and-coming,…
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How Ruby Namdar Wrote the Great Hebrew American Novel
I met Reuven “Ruby” Namdar on November 11, 2014 in New York, because I was writing a long piece about writers who live outside Israel and write in Hebrew. It turned out, by coincidence, that a few hours before our meeting he had gotten the biggest news of his career. He had been informed that…
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Granddaughters of the Shoah
Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind By Sarah Wildman Riverhead Books, 400 pages, $27.95 A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France By Miranda Richmond Mouillot Crown, 288 pages, $26 The latest Holocaust memoirs are by people who weren’t there, who are linked to the tragedy by the…
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An Eccentric Archeologist Who Drew a Line in the Sand
A German Jewish Iranologist, who lost his University of Berlin post in 1935 after officially declaring that his grandparents were Jewish, is one of several focuses of an exhibit about Asian travel at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. “The Traveler’s Eye: Scenes of Asia” is on view through May 31. Ernst Herzfeld…
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Of Gilda Radner, Ivan Boesky, Boisterous Brisket and 9 Other Facts About Jewish Michigan
1) 82,270 Jews live in Michigan. 2) Michigan’s first Jewish settler was Ezekiel Solomon. A fur trader, he operated a general store during the Revolutionary War. 3) Montreal-born fur trader Chapman Abraham was Detroit’s first Jewish settler, arriving there in 1762. 4) Founded in 1885 in Traverse City, Congregation Beth El is Michigan’s oldest synagogue….
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‘Conversion’ Is Key to Early Education
A new effort underway in Denver, backed by a wide-ranging coalition of Jewish organizations, hopes to use modern marketing techniques to increase enrollment at early childhood education centers and, in the process, lure a new generation of young and sometimes leery families back into Jewish life. The goals of the $810,000 initiative, led by the…
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The Neal Pollack Guide to Awards Season
Awards season is here. I love it so much that I wish I were receiving an award myself. Seriously, I will accept any award, from any ceremony, in any category. “Where is my award?” I will ask, while watching my TV. But absent some miraculous occurrence whereby I am transported into another dimension in which…
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Behind the Small Screen at Jon Stewart’s Gig
Forget bagels, Katz’s Deli and Crown Heights — New York City doesn’t get any Jewy-er than at the Daily Show: The taping of the fake news comedy show from Comedy Central has a) Jon Stewart, b) free tickets and c) did I mention Jon Stewart? Located in a nondescript building on 11th Avenue near West…
Most Popular
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Opinion I’m a Jew of color. Ta-Nehisi Coates can’t apply US lessons to Israel.
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Culture How my odious cousin Roy Cohn was responsible for creating Donald Trump — and me
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Fast Forward Was the viral Ta-Nehisi Coates interview a hit piece or fair play? A journalism ethics expert weighs in.
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Sports 5 Jewish things about the Mets — and why Jewish fans adore them
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward Is anti-Zionism a sin? We asked the rabbi whose viral Yom Kippur sermon begged the question
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Opinion For the sake of Israel, it’s time to retire the word ‘Zionism’
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Culture A Forverts truck has turned up as a prop in a Timothée Chalamet movie
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Fast Forward Why is there a Hebrew plaque in Trump’s office in ‘The Apprentice’ movie and what does it say?
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