Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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October 2, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward A Bintel Brief has a letter written by an embittered man who ran into trouble getting together a minyan for his son’s bris. It was the eve of Yom Kippur and, as he stood in front of his building, trying to find a 10th man for the minyan, a…
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Film & TV Yom Kippur on the Big Screen
Would you shut up? I’m trying to atone!” That line comes in the opening scene of “Kissing Jessica Stein” delivered by the titular character, as she sits in the pews on Yom Kippur and tries to fend off her relatives’ too-eager advice about snagging a man before next year’s Book of Life is shut. Jessica,…
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Patrick Swayze: This Jewish Girl Will Miss You
For Jewish women of a certain age, Patrick Swayze will always occupy a special corner of the heart. Tough and tender, he embodied for some of us — ok for me, at least — a certain fantasy. Let’s call it the Jewish girl’s yearning for the blue-eyed Christian boy — akin to the Jewish boy’s…
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Pornographic Stimulus Plan
The bearded receptionist wears a yarmulke. In any other office, this wouldn’t seem remarkable. But this is the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Lucas Entertainment, one of the largest gay adult film companies in the world. The yarmulke — worn in memory of a recently departed grandmother, it turns out — seems weirdly apt once you…
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Fusion Shmusion
With a multitude of workshops for musicians and Yiddish culture buffs, the annual KlezKanada Festival takes place at the end of August in the mountains north of Montreal. This year, I was able to sit in on Josh Dolgin’s “Fusion Shmusion” class, whose catalog description started with the question, “Does most Jewishy fusion music suck?”…
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Honor and Comfort
David Zinner is executive director of Kavod v’Nichum (Hebrew for “honor and comfort”), an organization that provides assistance in forming new burial societies, trains prospective burial society members, and identifies resources about Jewish bereavement practices for hevra kadisha groups and bereavement committees in synagogues and communities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Zinner is a co-founder…
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How I’m Losing My Love For Israel
To paraphrase a recent Jewish organizational tagline, I’ve “hugged and wrestled with Israel” for 20 years now. At first, it was all embrace: Zionist songs and culture nourished me like mother’s milk, and on my first trip to Israel I kissed the tarmac at Ben Gurion, as did the other USY (United Synagogue Youth) kids….
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Surrounded By Angels
Thousands of souls crowd the large, airy space, their attention riveted to the actions of four women leaning over a gurney at the center of the hall. In silence, the women tenderly disrobe the body lying under a sheet. Their reverence for the task shows in the beauty and economy of their hand movements, in…
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The Shrine Whose Shape I Am
At first, Babylonian yeshivas of Sura and Pumpedisa were full of poets. Every wagging finger, every dipping thumb, belonged to a poet; the spittle of ferocious arguments was real poetry. As Shelley wrote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” These Babylonian rabbis, composing Talmud and midrash, dreamed of legislating the myth; sensing the…
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Shalom Birdie: Charles Strouse’s Jewish Leitmotifs
The contributions of Jewish songwriters to Broadway musicals may seem overfamiliar, in part due to such distinguished examinations as Allen Forte’s “Listening to Classic American Popular Songs” (Yale University Press, 2001), itself something of a classic. Poet and editor David Lehman has just entered this crowded field with a highly personal new book, “A Fine…
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Fronting and Assimilating to a Gut Yontif
The onset of 5770 on Friday night September 18 posed a problem in Jewish etiquette. Normally, at the end of a kabbalat Shabbat, or Sabbath eve service, the members of the congregation turn to each other, shake hands (or hug and kiss, as is the custom in some synagogues in the United States today), and…
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