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
-
Video: The Arrest of Women of the Wall’s Anat Hoffman
Watch the video of the July 12 arrest of Anat Hoffman, the chair of Women of the Wall, as she and other members of the group make their way from the Western Wall plaza to Robinson’s Arch: The Sisterhood conducted the first interview with Hoffman following her arrest. Read it here.
-
Dancing Along, With Color
Art Spiegelman’s world of powerful drawings and the Pilobolus Dance Theater’s playful style intersect in an unusual collaboration that challenged the Pulitzer Prize-winning author to move out of his downtown studio and his own head. The dance piece, “Hapless Hooligan in ‘Still Moving,’” was set to premiere July 12 at the Joyce Theater, in New…
-
Books Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels, From One Generation to the Next
Fans of comic books and graphic novels are mourning the death of Harvey Pekar, who died today in his Cleveland home at the age of 70. Pekar was mainly known for authoring the autobiographical series “American Splendor,” which documented his lower-middle class Jewish upbringing in Ohio. Pekar also wrote “Our Cancer Year,” after being diagnosed…
The Latest
-
Books Gary Shteyngart Can’t Read
Haha. Or if you’re Gary Shteyngart feigning a Russian accent in his new book trailer, it might sound more like chah-chah. Book trailers are often too long and boring: earnest author fidgeting on a Brooklyn stoop, reciting the plot of her novel. You’re watching it thinking, “Stop telling me what happens. That’s what your book…
-
When Is a Glass Box Not Just a Glass Box?
Answer: when it houses Philadelphia’s new National Museum of American Jewish History. Scheduled to open in November, the museum is dominated by a massive glass facade and does not, at first glance, appear that different from other modernist glass and steel edifices in the United States. But looking behind the museum’s glass “veil” reveals a…
-
Caught Between Burlesque and Belief
Peep Show By Joshua Braff Algonquin Books, 272 pages, $13.95 After Joshua Braff’s excellent but largely unheralded “The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green,” his second novel is another coming-of-age story set in the mid-1970s. In “Peep Show,” though, the protagonist, David, and his sister are trapped by divorcing parents between two closed Jewish worlds of…
-
Cultural Materialism
Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America By Ken Koltun-Fromm Indiana University Press, 358 pages, $70 Being an Americanist in a Jewish studies department can be, from time to time, a humbling experience: When your colleague down the hall is educating her students about the Akkadian and Sumerian sources of the Torah or helping them…
-
Picture This
Chris Stein, founding member with Debbie Harry of the musical group Blondie, wants to publish a photo book about New York’s punk rock scene. “It will have all the dead people and everything,” Stein said from his home near Woodstock, N.Y. “I have a picture of Anthony Kiedis” — the very much alive lead vocalist…
-
Rivers Run Through the Bible Lands
Bill Morris writes that he has been “struck by the coincidence” of three rivers that flow partly or wholly through Israel, or along its borders, having names that start with the same syllable: the Jordan, or Yarden in Hebrew; the Yarmuk, an eastward-flowing tributary of the Jordan that joins it south of the Sea of…
-
Don’t Throw Away Yemen
Every so often, I’m seized by the compulsion to clean out my overpopulated drawers and closets and to dispose of all the stuff that I’ve accumulated over the years. Usually that compulsion passes quickly, but not this time: I was determined to deaccession. The process, though, was a halting and incomplete one, for no sooner…
-
July 16, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Two weeks ago, a woman saw another leave a lot of garbage in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The first woman told the other that she should clean up, and that newspapers had written about how Jews are slobs. After a dispute and no resolution, they left. Later, both picked up…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
- 2
Opinion How Israel became a country where teenagers murder each other in cold blood
- 3
Sports NBA coach Steve Kerr: ‘Israel sought revenge for Oct. 7 and now 72,000 Palestinians have been killed’
- 4
Film & TV A new documentary challenges stereotypes about Orthodox Jewish women — and their wigs
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward A new Hebrew press in Berlin argues that Israel doesn’t own the language
-
Fast Forward Jewish library and Chabad near Buenos Aires attacked, Argentine Jewish advocates say
-
Fast Forward Cornell’s Jewish president clashes with students following on-campus debate about Israel
-
Fast Forward U of Michigan apologizes after faculty chair praises pro-Palestinian students during commencement speech