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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Armageddon in Suburbia
Question: What do evangelical Christians and credit-default swaps have in common? Answer: They both wrecked the country, but few understand exactly how they did it. All right, that’s an exaggeration. America will survive the current recession. And despite the influence of evangelicals, we do not live in One Nation Under Jesus. Of course, evangelical Christians…
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Jokes and Other Things the French Find Funny
In France, Christmastime just might not seem the same without a new antisemitic jape, and the performer Dieudonné (born Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, just outside Paris in 1966, of Breton-Cameroonian origin) provided one on schedule during a Paris show. In what noted Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld later described to RTL radio as a deliberate, publicity-seeking “provocation” and…
The Latest
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January 23, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward “My dear husband! I have decided that I can no longer live with you. I am writing this letter with a wounded heart. My life with you has been unhappy because I do not love you. I am in love with Cohen and the two of us are leaving,…
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A Bounty of Hidden Gems
Just 20 miles south of the bustling modern city of Haifa lies a spot of Israel that time forgot. Few Israelis, never mind foreign visitors, have heard of Bat Shlomo. Like several other Zionist settlements, it was founded in the 1880s by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who helped residents with their often ill-fated agricultural projects….
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Five Sites That Whet the Appetite for Travel
The other night, I went looking for a synagogue in France. When I began my journey on the Web, I didn’t know that this particular synagogue was the country’s oldest; I only knew that it was in France and it was said to be a beauty. I learned about its age — deep roots into…
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In Prague, Where the Decisions are Easy
It is a common dilemma for Jewish tourists: Do you spend your time on the general sites and risk missing out on parts of your heritage, or do you concentrate on Jewish sites and wonder whether you are being parochial? Go to Prague, and the need to choose disappears. Visitors of all faiths — and…
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Family Tales and Mystery Amid the Markers
We took the A1 South toward Leeds, exited the highway at a junction crammed with cars, trucks, and construction equipment, negotiated one roundabout and then another, dropped down the hill, looked for the red sign and, sure enough, found the cemetery on Gelderd Road. The English sure know how to give good directions. I had…
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The Rabbi’s Son Who Built Detroit
Scroll down for a slideshow featuring Kahn’s work. Albert Kahn is America’s forgotten architect — even though in his lifetime, he (and his firm) produced more buildings than any other architect, and his design and production method changed the face of the country. Eighty years before the bailout of the auto industry, just before the…
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The Wisdom of Solomon
‘The tragedy,” American author Joshua Rubenstein once noted, “is that so many great Soviet Jewish figures have been forgotten and eclipsed. They are remembered only for their deaths.” One could apply such a description to Solomon Mikhoels, the brilliant Russian actor and director. Longtime leader of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (known as Goset), Mikhoels…
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Heard it Through the Grapevine
Rogov’s Guide to Israeli Wines 2009 By Daniel Rogov The Toby Press, 400 pages, $19.95. As far as we know, Thucydides was the first to judge a society by its knowledge or ignorance of the fruit-bearing vine. Classifying a civilization according to its cultivation of grapes and olives, the father of the historiographical essay saw…
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One Who Speaks Does Not Know
The Best American Spiritual Writing 2008 Edited by Philip Zaleski Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $14. Bad spiritual writing is easy. Good spiritual writing is hard. And often for the same reasons. First, to write about spirituality is necessarily to attempt to bridge the gap between private and public. Spiritual experiences, especially as distinct from religious…
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