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
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Barbra Streisand’s brand-new duet with Bob Dylan is a whole lot different than you might think
Though Dylan and Streisand's voices may seem ill-suited to each other, the two complement each other gorgeously on 'The Very Thought of You'
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The Shah Has Died
Zev Shanken of Teaneck, N.J., has an interesting question about chess, the modern Hebrew word for which is shah.mat, spelled hngy, with a Tet as its final letter. Since shah.mat comes from Russian shakhmaty, which is related to English “checkmate”; and since both these words, like similar expressions in other European languages (for example, Italian…
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Museum Woe
The news that the Eldridge Street Synagogue, aka Khal Adas Jeshurun Anshe Lubz — once one of the most architecturally distinctive houses of worship on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side — has, at the conclusion of a 20-year-long restoration project, turned itself into the innocuous-sounding Museum at Eldridge Street, is cause for both celebration and…
The Latest
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January 4, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward As a large-scale rent strike engulfs Manhattan’s Lower East Side, more than 150 strikers were called into Municipal Court on charges of failing to pay their rent. Of those standing accused, only one was sentenced by the court to leave his dwelling. With his landlord and the building’s housekeeper…
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December 28, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Over the past few weeks, there has been a man, known in the press as “Jack the Ripper,” who has a penchant for cutting off pieces of women’s clothing on the Brooklyn-Manhattan subway line. This week, Samuel Buchbinder, a suspender maker from Brownsville, was riding the subway into work…
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Film & TV ADL ‘Accepts’ Will Smith’s Clarification, JDL Supports Writers’ Strike
So the Anti-Defamation League has finally weighed in on L’Affaire Will Smith, and, I have to say, its statement is a little disappointing. To recap: Will Smith, speaking off the cuff to a Scottish newspaper, suggested — quite reasonably — that Hitler was driven by a “twisted” notion of what he thought was “good.” The…
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Yid Vid: Chabon Speaks
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon speaks about the controversy surrounding his book “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” how he feels about Israel, getting compared to Philip Roth and being a geek. Crackerjack Judeo-Christian reporter Brad Greenberg asks all the right questions (although I do sort of wish he had asked Chabon whether he loves his wife…
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Film & TV Will Smith Is No Hitler-Lover (and Will Someone Please Get TMZ.com a Subscription to the Forward)
In October, it was Halle Berry. She found herself in the celebrity hot seat, apologizing profusely following an innocent, if clumsy, remark that only the most hysterical among us would view as evidence of antisemitism. This month, apparently, it’s Will Smith’s turn. In a rambling interview published in Scotland’s Daily Record, Smith was quoted as…
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Keeping It in the Family
Who by Fire, Who by Blood By Jon Papernick Exile Editions, 346 pages, $26.95. The Jewish season of repentance is intended to broaden feelings of guilt — from daily activities to a smorgasbord of global and personal actions over the year that has passed. The world is not independent of us; we make it what…
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Bad Girls: Burlesque Show Puts Jewish Women in the Spotlight
Jewish burlesque seems, in a way, only natural. Sex and humor are inextricably bound in Jewish culture (or at least in certain precincts of it); potty-mouthed, voluptuous women are celebrated. The burlesque tradition took root in the Yiddish theater nearly a century ago when Jewish thespians, not content to be restrained by a single medium,…
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Israeli Plays Open Windows
Late last month, leading theater artists, producers and critics from 23 countries arrived in Tel Aviv for a six-day festival of Israeli plays. Organized by the Institute of Israeli Drama, the IsraDrama Festival brought together these international guests to attend productions, lectures and symposia on Israeli theater and to build future artistic collaborations. “So often…
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Hautzig’s Incredible Journey
As the floorboards creak in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the lilting voice of a Jewish émigré glides over the piano and carpets in his home above the city. Walter Hautzig, a world-renowned pianist who was born in Austria, began his 65-plus-year career as a child in Vienna, where his father and grandfather…
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