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
-
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
-
LABA and the Ripple Effect
As an eclectic roster of Jewish artists takes the stage at a new multimedia festival in early May, a bold new experiment aimed at transforming how Jewish communities connect with culture (and culture makers) will also enter the spotlight. From “absurdist rock cabaret” to giant sculptures to a “contact improvisation” workshop cheekily called “The Meating,”…
-
Sunny Side Down
Sunnyside By Glen David Gold Knopf, 576 pages, $26.95. Perhaps you’ll know where I am going with this review if I begin by saying that Glen David Gold’s last book was splendid. So many fiction writers begin small, writing about what they know, etching a fine portrait of a particular and familiar time and place,…
The Latest
-
An Israeli, a German and a Palestinian Walk Into a Theater…
A strange three-act drama is played out here in Germany with unsettling regularity. Some public figure — usually a politician — will make a comparison between the present-day and Nazi Germany. I’ll grab the first example that comes to mind. Last year, a week before the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a well-known German economist from…
-
Roee Chen: Enigma, Director
How does a Sephardic Jew whose father’s family has lived in Israel since the Spanish Inquisition come to translate and adapt the quintessentially Ashkenazic Isaac Bashevis Singer for the originally Russian-speaking Jaffa-based Gesher Theatre? According to Roee Chen, it’s done by pretending to be someone you aren’t. “I was 19 and needed a job,” Chen…
-
Saving the World, One Jew at a Time
Spiritual Activism: A Jewish Guide to Leadership and Repairing the World By Rabbi Avraham Weiss Jewish Lights Publishing, 224 pages, $24.99. Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. & the Jewish Community By Rabbi Marc Schneier Jewish Lights Publishing, 240 pages, $18.99. As a rabbi who has devoted her career to social and economic justice, I…
-
Shabbos Goy a la Mode
Not being a very ritually observant Jew, I needed the Home & Garden section of the April 9 New York Times, to which my attention was called by my wife, to teach me a new Jewish term I didnt know. This is “Sabbath mode,” and it has been around, so I subsequently learned, since 1997,…
-
May 1, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward An unusual blood-libel report has reached us from Brisk, Russian-ruled Poland, where a local tailor had taken in a Christian man as a boarder. Apparently, the young Christian initiated a love affair with the tailor’s wife, and when the tailor found out about it, he arranged for three butcher…
-
Awaiting Rapture
By Gwen Orel Deborah Zoe Laufer’s play “End Days,” which received an American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg citation, has already been staged nine times this year — including an ongoing production in Salt Lake City — and will open in Atlanta next month, and outside Philadelphia over the summer. In “End Days,” a Jewish mother…
-
New Life for Arthur Szyk
“An artist, especially a Jewish artist, cannot remain neutral in these times. He cannot escape to still lifes, abstractions and experiments.” These words, uttered in 1934, belong to Polish-Jewish illustrator and political caricaturist Arthur Szyk (1894–1951). As one of World War II’s most widely circulated propagandists, he fought the National Socialist regime and the Axis…
-
Offbeat Israel: A YouTube Mashup Sensation
The stars of the videos mostly live thousands of miles away from each other. They have never met one another or the producer — and they haven’t even been told they would be making an appearance. This is “Thru You,” a quirky homemade creation of 26-year-old Israeli Ophir Kutiel and the latest sensation on YouTube. It…
-
Breakthrough After Breakthrough: Israeli Film History in Motion
One of the few surprises of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony was the snub of Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir,” the animated film about the First Lebanon War that seemed poised to win Israel its first ever statuette for best foreign film. Instead, the Oscar went unexpectedly (some might say inexplicably) to the Japanese film…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News How Jewish can you be in a Boca country club? Wrapping tefillin got a family suspended, lawsuit says
- 2
News An Alabama millionaire offered Jews $50,000 to move to his town. 16 years later, what’s left?
- 3
Opinion Trump is forcing liberal Zionists to confront an extraordinarily inconvenient truth
- 4
News ‘Very misguided’: ADL regional board member resigns over organization’s approach to antisemitism and civil rights
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Zohran Mamdani is right about what ‘intifada’ means — well, kind of
-
Opinion Will the U.S. get involved in Iran? Mike Huckabee’s evangelical worldview may be the key
-
Fast Forward Trump is keeping the world guessing about his Iran intentions. Could his first term offer clues?
-
Fast Forward In tearful address, Mamdani laments criticism following his ‘globalize the intifada’ comments
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
