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
-
The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
-
Getting to the ‘Bottom’ of a Kiwi Query
This column’s first letter from New Zealand is surely cause for celebration. It comes from Daniel Meyrowitz of Auckland, who writes: “I have an inquiry about what I assume to be a Yiddish word, ‘unterdetzura’ or ‘interdeshira.’ I gather from the context in conversation that it means something like the English idiom ‘the long and…
-
Part V: Writing in My Father’s Footsteps
After the battle at Tamra, my father’s commander, Norm Schutzman, moved the men of B-Company up to the coast North of Haifa for more training. In late fall, Schutzman received orders that the entire 7th Brigade, including his company, was to clear the Galilee of Arab troops to the Lebanese border. Schutzman’s company’s assignment was…
The Latest
-
Youngish, Yiddish and Staging a Revival
Yiddish was alive and doing quite well, for a sure few hours, at a synagogue on the edge of downtown Philadelphia. Onstage, six performers — in their 20s and 30s, which constitutes young for Yiddish speakers — were speaking the centuries-old language of European Jews with ease. The jokes were flying. The music was piping….
-
July 3, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Like a conquering army, the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side were filled with thousands of white-capped, white-shirted bakers waving red flags and beaming with joy at the final settling of their strike. Thousands of well-wishers lined the streets to cheer them on and to listen to the bands…
-
The Art Of Memory
The sparkling glass walls of the new Derfner Judaica Museum look out across the Hudson River by way of a sculpture garden on a rolling green lawn. Look back, and you see the impressive contemporary art collection of the Hebrew Home at Riverdale. The museum’s clean, modern design, by architect Louise Braverman, looks to the…
-
Reb Zalman’s Ah-ha Hasidism
Ahron’s Heart: The Prayers, Teachings and Letters of Ahrele Roth, a Hasidic Reformer By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Yair Hillel Goelman Ben Yehudah Press, 150 pages, $14.95. A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Netanel Miles-Yepez The Jewish Publication Society, 384 pages, $45.00. Contemporary American religion is filled…
-
Eliot’s Zionism Before Zionism
The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot By Gertrude Himmelfarb Encounter Books, 180 pages, $25.95. In the recent speech he delivered in Cairo to the Muslim world, President Obama declared that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” Is the legitimacy of Zionism based primarily on past…
-
Wild Grass Grows High
Last Christmas, a group of very lapsed Jews gathered around a table of very treyf *Chinese food — in China, for good measure. Eventually, someone remembered that it was the fifth night of Hanukkah, too. Soon, a low-rent menorah punched out of sheet metal was produced from a battered Chabad box, and candles were lit….
-
Tupac in Tehran
In the Land of the Ayatollahs Tupac Shakur Is King: Reflections from Iran and the Arab World By Shahzad Aziz Amal Press, 296 pages, $14.95. Albanian music is amazing. Still, in the spring of 2007, I bypassed racks of polyphonic folk and clarinet-led pop in a market cassette stall in Korce, Albania, to spend 2,000…
-
Neurotic Parenting in America
American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland By Sam Apple Ballantine Books, 320 pages, $25.00 The symptoms of new parenthood are almost indistinguishable from those of psychosis: insomnia, depression, paranoia, mood swings. For those of us lucky enough to still have jobs, working and parenting also means moving seamlessly to diapers from…
-
What’s Working for Woody?
There is no talking about this Woody Allen movie without talking about Woody. But before I get into that, I’d rather assert how much I admire him — for his achievements, of course, and for how, at the relatively advanced age of 73, he is still making interesting movies. Like Philip Roth, his rough contemporary,…
Explore
Most Popular
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Anti-Israel rhetoric is fueling an alarmingly powerful new wave of antisemitism on the right
-
Fast Forward Joe Rogan defends Ye’s ‘Heil Hitler’ song
-
Fast Forward NYU withholds diploma of student who condemned ‘genocide’ and ‘atrocities currently happening in Palestine’ in graduation speech
-
Fast Forward Jewish activist Shabbos Kestenbaum settles antisemitism lawsuit with Harvard
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
