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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50 Sheitels of Grey
For a section of the population, a bondage and domination film is an excuse to not only let its hair down, but take it off entirely. For Chani, a self-described “Ortho-fox,” the book and film (which she hasn’t at all, ever, chas v’shalom, ever read or seen or even really heard of) are confirmation that…
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Black Hat Messiah
D’Angelo Converts?
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Pain and Ponce Are Deli’s Main Ingredients
As you enter the narrow doorway of Brooklyn’s Pearlstein + Dung, the first thing that greets you is the sparse shtetl décor and the pungent odor of artisanal cuisine. With furnishings based on drawings from a crumbling book in Slovakian synagogue basement, the shop is the brainchild of Ari and Zounette Pearlstein. Ari strokes his…
The Latest
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Vaccination Comes From Cows and Jews
I have chosen to soil the sabbatical year — to put the shit into Shmita — by announcing that this will be my final Phil O’Lologous column. After producing 7,618 — or exactly a Dyson Number — of columns, I will retire to my dictionaries, my tomes and my vellum to practice cunning linguistics alone….
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Jew Hatred, the New Euro Retro Chic?
One of the hottest new trends in Europe is also one of the oldest — attacking Jews. And the energy driving this throwback can be traced to some of Europe’s newest residents, as Islamist immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East are taking up a tradition of their new home and making it their…
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‘MikiLeaks’ Reveals New NSA Spying Scandal
Rabbi Barry Freundel, who has pled guilty to 52 counts of voyeurism, has revealed that he was recruited as part of a government surveillance program called “MikiLeaks.” The program, run by the National Security Agency, targeted Jewish ritual baths, known as mikvehs, to collect evidence of individuals peeing in the mikveh. Freundel’s claims were backed…
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Rabbi Freundel’s 8 Reasons There Should Be an Alarm Clock in The Mikveh
1) To distract from the dripping tap. 2) So that mikveh dippers can time themselves to make sure they don’t take too long to get naked. 3) To make the changing room reassuringly haimish, like a bedroom. 4) Really? A practice dunk is totally normal but having a clock in there is the weird part?…
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Dying to Party: Top Celebs Reveal Funeral Plans
Joan Rivers, who died in September 2014, had her funeral all planned out in her autobiography. “I want my funeral to be a huge showbiz affair with lights, cameras, action… I want craft services, I want paparazzi and I want publicists making a scene. I want it to be Hollywood all the way. I don’t…
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The Amazing Grace of Leonard Nimoy
I often called him Leib, his Yiddish name, picking up on the term of endearment used by his wife, Susan. We were friends for more than 25 years, the trailing spouses of the even longer friendship between our wives. I was not a Trekkie (or Trekker, to use the term Leonard preferred). I didn’t watch…
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Of Rosanne Barr, King David Kalakaua and 9 Other Things About Jewish Hawaii
1) Seven thousand two hundred and eighty Jews live in Hawaii. 2) One of the earliest documented appearances of a Jew in the Hawaiian islands occurred in 1798, when a sailor named Ebenezer Townsend, Jr. recorded that the Hawaiian king came aboard a whaling ship with a cook belonging to the Mosaic faith. 3) Jewish…
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Cancer-Stricken Israeli Playwright Finds Comedy in Disease
Producer Daniel Krupnik and his wife, translator Hilla Bar, first encountered “Happy Ending”in April 2014, when they saw a photograph in an Israeli newspaper accompanying an article about Anat Gov’s musical play. The picture depicted a woman dancing hand-in-hand with a man dressed as a crab. Not long afterwards, they decided to translate and adapt…
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