Articles written collectively by the Forward’s staff.
Forward Staff
By Forward Staff
-
Culture Forward 50 | Eli Cohen: The rabbi trying to heal Crown Heights
Crown Heights, with its fraught history of black-Jewish tensions that erupted in riots 30 years ago, has this year seen a spike in violent attacks against the visibly Orthodox. Starting this summer, Rabbi Eli Cohen, executive director of the neighborhood’s Jewish community council, teamed up with a prominent black activist, Geoffrey Davis, to meet with…
-
Culture Carly Pildis: Zionist Feminist Activist
Carly Pildis, 34, has for several years been a forceful writer on Twitter and in the Jewish media (including Opinion articles in the Forward), addressing anti-Semitism on the left and right, and fighting for progressive Jews who don’t want to hide their support for Israel’s existence. In 2019, as controversies about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism raged,…
-
Culture Forward 50 | Chaya Porus Palevsky: Lithuanian partisan hero
On display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s new Auschwitz exhibit is a hand-embroidered floral blouse Chaya Palevsky made for her older sister Rachel Porus, a nurse, who kept many people alive in the Švenčionys ghetto. When the family was put on a train, bound, they believed, for Kaunas, Chaya made a split-second decision to…
-
Culture Forward 50 | Adam Berman: The urban farmer
Adam Berman made made his first foray into community organizing as a teenager, by starting an environmental club at school. Years later, while directing a Jewish retreat center in Connecticut, he started a program around green living and called it Adamah, the Hebrew word for “earth.” In 2010, he moved to Berkeley and opened Urban…
-
Culture Forward 50 | Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman: Refugee, war hero, patriot
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman may not be particularly telegenic. Of the witnesses called before the House Intelligence Committee in the impeachment inquiry of President Trump’s alleged quid pro quo with Ukraine, Vindman, 44, certainly could not be accused of bringing the pizzazz. That only made his testimony — of perceived abuses about which he could…
-
Culture Jamie Margolin: The Teenager Who Would Be President
Teenage activists are something of a phenomenon in recent years: David Hogg on guns, Greta Thunberg on climate change, Mari Copeny on the Flint water crisis. Then there is Margolin, who is 18 and spent the year appearing at dozens of conferences around the world, all while writing a book, passing her classes and applying…
-
Culture Joseph Cedar: The Director Of Complexity
The HBO miniseries “Our Boys” dramatized the story of the brutal 2014 murder of the Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir, which, following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, helped build momentum toward the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. The series was co-directed by Cedar, 51, an American-born Israeli filmmaker; Hagai Levi, an Israeli television creator;…
-
Culture Abby Stein: The Barrier Breaker
Abby Stein’s memoir “Becoming Eve,” about her life and transition, was released in November, but she had been clearing her throat for that text for years. After coming out as trans on her blog in 2015, Stein established a Trans Meet-Up with Eshel, a LGBTQ nonprofit for Orthodox Jews. This year, Stein, 28, was part…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Culture He works at a Holocaust museum by day. How’d he end up in ‘Marty Supreme’?
- 2
News The ADL’s turn away from civil rights was years in the making — Oct. 7 accelerated it
- 3
News The Holocaust Torah that survived a Mississippi synagogue fire was brought there by the state’s only survivor
- 4
Culture The mysterious case of Barbra Streisand and the missing half-pound of Zabar’s sturgeon
In Case You Missed It
-
News How a Persian Jewish immigrant became the rodeo king of California
-
Fast Forward Argentina’s chief Sephardic rabbi reaffirms century-old ban on local conversions, sparking backlash
-
Fast Forward Mourner’s Kaddish for Bondi Beach victims recited in Australian parliament as tougher hate crime laws pass
-
Fast Forward An activist criticized Miami Beach’s Jewish mayor on Facebook — then police came knocking
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
