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
-
Adversary A
The Death of the Adversary: A Novel By Hans Keilson Translated by Ivo Jarosy Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208 pages, $14.00 Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel By Hans Keilson Translated by Damion Searls Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 144 pages, $22.00 Hans Keilson was born in Germany in 1909 to a working-class Jewish family…
-
All Stories Are True
Three decades after his death at age 70, the art of socially involved Jewish American painter Ben Shahn has never been more widely admired and discussed. A brilliant catalog by Alejandro Anreus for the landmark 2001 exhibit at the Jersey City Museum, “Ben Shahn and ‘The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti,’” analyzed the artist’s extensive…
-
Awake and Act, For It Can Happen Here
On April 8, 1935, congressional legislation created the Works Progress Administration, which developed millions of jobs for the unemployed. WPA agencies placed 8.5 million Americans on the federal payroll, including hundreds of Yiddish actors, writers, scene designers and theater directors hired for the administration’s Federal Theatre Project. On the 75th anniversary of the WPA and…
The Latest
-
Bliss, By Way of Adult Movies
‘Finding Bliss” stars Leelee Sobieski as Jody Balaban, a young film school graduate who heads out to Los Angeles with high and naive hopes for a bright future. Ultimately, the only job she can get is editing porn flicks at the same studio where “Gladiator” was shot. Well, not exactly “Gladiator.” It was “Glad He…
-
Jews Behaving Badly
The cringe-inducing spectacle of Jews tied to the world financial implosion took center stage at the recent Cannes Film Festival. Even fiction got in on the act. From investment bankers called out by the documentary “Inside Job” to the haimish yet shady broker played by Frank Langella in the new feature “Wall Street: Money Never…
-
Springing From The Tar Heels
The long history and deep roots of Jews in the Tar Heel state are coming to life in an ambitious new multimedia project that kicks off June 14 with an exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. “Down Home,” which encompasses a slickly produced documentary film and handsomely illustrated coffee-table book, celebrates…
-
Live Long and Super
Ron D. Wegsman writes from the Bronx: “The Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently carried a feature article about the first supermarket in Israel, the ‘Supersol’ on Ben-Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, which is where my mother shopped for groceries when I was a baby. I had always thought that this supermarket (and subsequent ones in the…
-
June 11, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward There was chaos this week at the fifth convention of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union after the event’s chairman, a Mr. Deutsch, refused to allow delegates to give their reports in Yiddish. A number of the delegates informed Deutsch that their reports had been written in Yiddish and…
-
Meet the ‘Tichel Cuties’
Look what just hit the Internet — the Tichel Cuties (tichel being the scarf that traditionally observant Jewish women wear over their hair once they are married) singing a kosher version of some Lady Gaga songs. Well, it may be kosher, but it’s not so innocent. The sexual overtones — not to mention some of…
-
Building and Breaking Barriers
Facing each other, kneeling on top of a restaurant bar, Ella and Edo slowly begin to dance. YelleB, the dance company, made up of Israeli duo Ella Ben-Aharon and Edo Ceder, is continually exploring new performance spaces, so it is no surprise that at the company’s benefit party a wine bar would be used as…
-
Books Our Rack: Némirovsky Bio, Translated Hebrew Fiction, Advice With Lox
Non-Fiction • The newly translated “The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903-1942,” (Knopf) by French writers Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, tells the life story of the author of the posthumous bestseller “Suite Francaise.” The biography covers Némirovsky’s childhood in Russia, her adulthood in her adopted country of France, and her death at Auschwitz. Philipponnat and…
Most Popular
- 1
Culture In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026
- 2
News Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
- 3
Exclusive Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure you
- 4
Culture 70 years ago, this Jewish choreographer predicted our epidemic of loneliness and isolation
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward National support group for interfaith Jewish families guts staff amid funding crisis
-
Fast Forward Jewish groups condemn Trump’s threat that a ‘whole civilization will die’ in Iran
-
Opinion Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews
-
Culture Ben Lerner’s tale of three hotels is a lyrical novel of loss and human potential
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism