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
-
Music
Shtick and Awe: Daniel Barenboim in New York
You’d think Godzilla, or at least an enemy flotilla, had stormed the gates of the city, the way the media has trumpeted the news; the Financial Times announces, “Daniel Barenboim has invaded New York.” The 66-year-old pianist-conductor, born in Buenos Aires to a family of Russian Ashkenazic Jews who later immigrated to Israel, is definitely…
-
Graphic Confessions of Jewish Women
Before you even see her face, Vanessa Davis’ naked breast makes an appearance in the first panel of “Spaniel Rage,” her acclaimed book of diaristic comics. She’s vomiting into a garbage can on page two. By the third page, she’s servicing two clowns in an X-rated thought bubble. Rude? Shocking? Indecent? Try “charming, funny, and…
-
The 1-in-5 Majority
Comic strip by Eli Valley. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version. Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His comics appear monthly in The Forward, and his website is www.evcomics.com.
The Latest
-
Yiddish Poetry: Up Close and Personal
With Everything We’ve Got: A Personal Anthology of Yiddish Poetry Edited and Translated By Richard J. Fein Host Publications, 218 pages Hardcover $35.00, Softcover $17.50. While every process of translation involves a dialogue between the work and the person rendering it into a foreign tongue, many translators go to great pains to play down that…
-
Man in Search Of Language
Readers expecting a grand symphony on how Hebrew was revived as a living language beginning in the late 19th century will be disappointed by Ilan Stavans’s “Resurrecting Hebrew.” The book deals more with Stavans’s own re-encounter with the language and its meaning for his life than with the creation of modern Hebrew in the late…
-
The Great Chrismukkah Mashup
Diwon The Beat Guide to Yiddish Free to download on shemspeed.com/diwon Not for sale. Erran Baron Cohen Songs In The Key Of Hanukkah New Line Records, $12.00 Every artist remembers the first time he or she re–masters another artist’s work. The poet Ezra Pound caught his artistic stride translating traditional Japanese and Chinese poems complete…
-
December 12, 2008
100 Years Ago in the Forward Released from Sing-Sing prison just a few months ago, following a long stint for robbery, 21-year-old Solomon “Nig” Stein was arrested as the main suspect in the “Harlem chloroform robberies,” in which victims were put to sleep with chloroform and then robbed. The police, having been on Stein’s trail…
-
Stranger in a Strange Land
D. Nahil writes: “Although I was referred to in a blog as a sheygetz in a kind, jovial manner, I’m actually a middle-aged goy who follows the Torah and is thinking of a halakhically Orthodox conversion. What word would be used, more correctly, to describe me (again, in a jovial manner)?” If Mr. Nahil’s letter…
-
Bound Up for Two Decades: A Test of Faith
Twenty years ago, young composer Lawrence Goldberg entered his one-act opera about the binding of Isaac into The Jewish Music Commission of Los Angeles’ competition for a new pulpit opera. Of the resultant piece, “A Test of Faith,” Dr. Richard Braun, chairperson of the commission, reported: “It was just the kind of piece that we hoped…
-
A Prayer of One’s Own
A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book By Aliza Lavie Spiegel & Grau, 448 pages, $35. God speaks to Jewish women as well as to Jewish men. God loves Jewish women as well as God loves Jewish men. From biblical times to the present, there have been prayers that speak to this love, answer this call and…
-
When a Blessing Is an Error
Four readers — Martin Flax, Gerald Weiss, Steve Oren and Gil Kulick — have written to scold me for mistakenly equating the biblical name Barak, meaning “lightning,” with the presidential name Barack in my column of October 31, which dealt with Hebrew campaign buttons in America’s recent elections. They all made the same point —…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Culture Inside the ancient Christian theology driving modern antisemitism
- 2
News Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
- 3
Opinion The moral degradation of Israel’s far right is even worse than you think
- 4
Culture In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026
In Case You Missed It
-
Culture Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
-
Looking Forward How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
-
Fast Forward Connecticut Catholic school punishes students who targeted ‘Jew Canaan’ rivals on social media
-
Fast Forward Pro-Palestinian rally at Buchenwald memorial is shut down by German authorities
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
