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
-
Going Up, One More Time, Gentlemen Please
Three distinguished readers have sent me four e-mails concerning my October 15 column on the expression “making aliyah.” All make good points. Let’s start with Noyekh Miller, the redoubtable editor of the Yiddish language website Mendele. He e-mailed me twice. The first time was to say: “You’re right in pointing to the increasing proportion of…
-
Harry Houdini: The Art of Assimilation
How to explain the durability of Harry Houdini — subject of a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York? He died more than 80 years ago in Detroit, yet his fame remains undimmed and unabated. Indeed, utter his name to adolescents and — even though they’re unlikely to have seen any of the…
-
A Mexican Suitcase Finds Its Context
In 1939, famed war photographer Robert Capa left a suitcase of film negatives in the care of his darkroom manager, Csiki Weiss. Capa, who fled Paris for New York in advance of the German invasion, would never again see the suitcase, which held dozens of rolls of undeveloped film that he and his colleagues, Gerda…
The Latest
-
November 12, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward The first steps have finally been taken!” a Forverts editorial reads. “Socialism has made its entrance into the U.S. Congress. Three representatives, three trustworthy, capable representatives from our party — Comrades Berger and Gaylord from Milwaukee, and Comrade Bachman from Columbus — were elected to the House of Representatives….
-
Discovering Kafka and Rabbi Nachman
Arts and culture editor Dan Friedman interviewed award-winning poet and author Rodger Kamenetz, whose new book about his physical and spiritual pilgrimage, “Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka” (Schocken/Nextbook), charts a path between literature and religion. The Arty Semite is now featuring excerpts and reviews from Kamenetz’s Psalm 151 series. Dan Friedman….
-
Books Getting Close to Your Food Is Harder When Meat Is Involved
On Monday, Sue Fishkoff wrote about people who only keep kosher on holidays. She is the author of “Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author…
-
Books The Meaning of Money
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Many moons ago, when I was a graduate student in Jewish history happily spending my days doing little else but reading, one of the most intriguing books I encountered was not Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed,” or “Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrin” or, for that matter, Hannah Arendt’s “The…
-
Books Q&A: Author Michael Wex on the Jewish Comic Novel
Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically…
-
Forward 50, 2010
Economy Joseph Stiglitz Until 2000, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was a leading member of Washington?s policymaking establishment. But something happened: He became an acerbic critic of his former colleagues and even of the premises of modern capitalism ? a position he outlines in his latest book, ?Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of…
-
New Language Meets New ‘Genius’
As early immigrants to what is now Israel were learning how to communicate in a revived ancient language, the hard-of-hearing among them were creating a new language altogether. Combining signs from most all of the different countries from which the Jewish populations emigrated, Israeli Sign Language began to take shape in the 1930s. Around the…
-
Someone To Run With in Israel
It had to be one of the most moving reality TV moments. On September 4, seconds before 18-year-old Holon resident Diana Golbi was crowned winner of “Kokhav Nolad,” Israel’s version of “American Idol,” program makers revealed how she had started on the road to national stardom. They showed a clip of her making a visit,…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion New York’s Israel Day parade was a shanda — but not because of Mamdani
- 2
Opinion How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?
- 3
News Floyd Mayweather showered cash on Jewish causes — and now he’s suing their ‘Robin Hood’ alleging $175 million got diverted
- 4
Opinion Israeli and diaspora Jews live in different realities. The Israel Day parade proved it
In Case You Missed It
-
Looking Forward My irrational, possibly problematic obsession with an $85 yarmulke
-
News How Iran is outsourcing terror plots against Jews
-
Theater They helped elect Los Angeles’ first Black mayor; but to him, they were just Bob and Shirley
-
Books In ‘Something We Said,’ Richard Pryor’s daughter finds words to discuss the unspeakable