This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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5 Jewish Ways To Celebrate Martin Luther King Day
While for many, Martin Luther King Day means a welcome break from work. For those eager to spend it honoring King’s memory, here are some options for celebrating the day — with a Jewish spin. 1) Volunteer The best way to recognize King’s service is by continuing his legacy. Repair the World, an organization dedicated…
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A Baker, A Challah and a Gun: A Tel Aviv Story
I can’t get my aggression right. It’s the register. The pitch is all wrong on the streets of Tel Aviv. Let me give you an example. I was at the shuk a few weeks back. The shuk is an outdoor market, but it is to your urban organic farmers market — the one that pops…
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Books Holocaust Survivor Wins Literary Award for 1st Children’s Book
Aharon Appelfeld. BOSTON — A celebrated Israeli novelist is among the winners of this year’s Sydney Taylor Book Award for Jewish children’s books. The Association of Jewish Libraries on Thursday announced the selection of Aharon Applefeld, an 83-year-old Holocaust survivor who has written about the genocide extensively. He won the award for older readers for…
The Latest
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Bezmozgis + Ibsen = Natasha
Natalie Portman’s “A Tale of Love and Darkness” might be the most anticipated film adaptation of a work of prose (Amos Oz’s incomparable memoir of the same name, 2002) at the current New York Jewish Film Festival. But Russian-speaking Jews are rooting for “Natasha.” This film, by Latvian Canadian writer and filmmaker David Bezmozgis, is…
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Was the Holocaust Made Possible by Demise of European States?
In his 2010 book “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” historian Timothy Snyder examined the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history. That book rethought some key assumptions of both Holocaust and Soviet history by noting similarities and interactions between the two regimes and the events…
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Drawing Out the Secret World of New Yorker Cartoonists
Before a recent screening of “Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists” at HBO’s headquarters, director Leah Wolchok introduced her debut documentary. Standing behind a mahogany podium and wearing white thick-rimmed glasses, she spoke with a slight undertone of annoyance about how long it took to finish the film. So long, in…
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6 Unexpected Jewish Things About Alan Rickman
Let’s face it, there’s not much Jewish about Alan Rickman, the famed British who died of cancer on 14 January. He is well-known for playing our favorite villains, like Harry Potter’s Severus Snape and Die Hard’s Hans Gruber. But in reality, Rickman was mensch: married to the same woman for over 40 years, a close…
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VIDEO: On Being a New Yorker Cartoonist
In December, 2015, Leah Wolchok’s documentary “Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists” debuted on HBO. Among the featured cartoonists in the film is Liana Finck, a Forward contributor and the author of “A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York.” The Forward asked Finck about her own feelings about…
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Meet the Orthodox Star of Oscar-Nominated ‘Son of Saul’
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In November of 2015, Geza Rohrig, the 48 year-old Hungarian-born lead actor of “Son of Saul,” an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, had an unexpectedly poignant moment. In the film, Rohrig plays a member of the Sonderkommando, the units of Jewish male prisoners in the…
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Elena Ferrante’s Jewish Inspiration
When Hitler traveled to Rome to meet with Mussolini in 1938, Elsa Morante stood by her window with a pot of boiling oil on the stove. The duo’s parade route was going to pass directly below her apartment, and she was planning to dump the scalding liquid on their heads as they went by. She…
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Film & TV Why Gad Elmaleh Is the Most Popular Jewish Comic You’ve Never Heard of
Gad Elmaleh is working out a bit. The Moroccan-Jewish-French comedian and I are sitting in the lobby of a swanky Tribeca hotel the night after his show at Joe’s Pub in downtown Manhattan, talking about his foray into English-language stand-up comedy. Elmaleh, who was born in Casablanca, is wondering whether there’s room in his act…
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Opinion The Gaza hostage crisis could forever change how American Jews relate to Israel — but it’s not too late to fix that
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
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