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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Books
Margaret Atwood Rejects Cultural Boycott of Israel
As we saw with the Batsheva Dance Company in 2009 and the Jerusalem Quartet in March, when it comes to Israel, even the most straightforward arts organizations have the potential to become the subjects of political controversy. The most recent flare-up centered around Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who accepted the Dan David Prize for literature…
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A. B. Yehoshua, Daniel Mendelsohn and an Opportunity at ‘The Lost’
Shortly after college I had a girlfriend who was interested in the profound nature of reality. Among other things, our intimacy, for her, was a platform to investigate with honesty what we thought about existence. Without realizing what was going on, I laughed off these attempts which with hindsight, and even at the time, I…
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Documenting a Sweatshop Cinderella: Q&A with Suzanne Wasserman
The short new documentary, “Sweatshop Cinderella,” captures the fascinating life story of the writer Anzia Yezierska. Best known for her 1925 novel, “Bread Givers,” Yezierska’s incredible life story involved a romance with philosopher John Dewey, as well as a brief stint in Hollywood. The documentary reveals fragments of the only known voice recording of Yezierska,…
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Film & TV ‘Holy Rollers’ and the 10-Minute Bar Mitzvah
In preparation for his upcoming film, “Holy Rollers,” based on actual events in the late 1990s, when members of the Hasidic community were recruited as drug mules, actor Jesse Eisenberg, 26, became a bar mitzvah. The Queens native spent time at the Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn. “They asked me if I’d been bar mitzvahed,” he…
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May 14, 2010
100 Years Ago in The Forward A group of mothers on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has approached the Forward. The ladies have asked that the paper help save their children from certain disaster. “Warn your readers,” the mothers told our reporter, “not to allow their children to go into moving picture houses by themselves. Our…
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Mossad Agent in a Bustier
Thirteen years ago, when you saw the first “Austin Powers” movie, you may have exited the theater feeling somewhat unsatisfied at the film’s conclusion. If only, you thought with a sigh, the film had been about a wacky French secret agent hunting Nazis in Brazil in the 1960s! Maybe, you fantasized, he could even team…
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Life and Times of ‘a Jewish Saint’
When Joe Lieberman’s 2000 vice presidential bid raised prospects of a Jew in the White House, some American Jews could have been forgiven for thinking they’d been there, done that. For 100 years earlier came a president they had already embraced as one of their own: Abraham Lincoln. The special bond that Jews feel for…
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Welcome to Cohenworld
Witz: The Story of the Last Jew on Earth By Joshua Cohen Dalkey Archive Press, 824 pages, $18.95 It’s a shame that no one will read this book. Or, rather, it’s an indictment of contemporary reading practices that the scope and flavor of Joshua Cohen’s epic novel “Witz” will escape all but the most passionate…
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‘Sweatshop Cinderella,’ Minus the Happily Ever After
She was “loud, coarse and demanding, constantly intruding her presence everywhere and taking up all the air in the room,” according to literary critic Vivian Gornick. She married twice, divorced quickly and left her daughter with her second husband, the child’s father, in order to write. She was a short-lived star of a writer, whose…
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Private Genius, Public Spotlight
A photography exhibit radiating quiet humanity, honoring the Lithuanian-Jewish photographer Izis, who was born Israëlis Bidermanas, is warming the City of Paris’s chilly official administration building, l’Hôtel de Ville. “Izis, Paris of Dreams” runs until May 29 and is a must-see for anyone visiting the city. A splendid catalog from Les Éditions Flammarion explains the…
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Lens on Apartheid’s Haunting Legacy
For more than half a century, South African photographer David Goldblatt has been probing the emotional core of his native land, capturing the human cost, and the haunting legacy, of apartheid. The Jewish Museum’s new retrospective, “South African Photographs: David Goldblatt,” is the first major overview in New York of Goldblatt’s work in more than…
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