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
-
August 15, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Sweatshop romances are not uncommon among the Jews of New York City, but it looked like trouble when 19-year-old Sarah Bennett fell in love with an Italian worker, Jim Troyano, at the paper box factory on the Bowery, where they both worked. Both of them having been in America…
-
Lord Have Mercy
Reader Alan Margolis wants to know whether the English name John comes from the biblical name Yohanan — which, he writes, “sounds like Hebrew for ‘God has had mercy.’” Margolis is right on both counts. John does ultimately come from Yohanan, and Yohanan indeed means “God has had mercy” or “God has forgiven.” It’s a…
-
Beijingers Wait for Olympics Largesse To Trickle Down
Riding my bike home from dinner on Saturday night, I saw flashing lights fill the night sky over the rooftops in the distance. For once the night was a clear one, devoid of the usual smog. Turning a corner I could see the sparkle of fireworks: the opening ceremony rehearsal. I asked my neighbor, a…
The Latest
-
An Olympic Welcome, From Your Friendly Neighborhood Big Brother
The colorful billboards that hang along the highways, boulevards and parks here declare the Beijing 2008 Olympic slogan, “One World One Dream,” in a number of languages, including Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Russian. Hebrew did not make the cut. Given that the entire population of world Jewry could fit into this city of 17…
-
Reel Life: Israeli Artist Maya Zack Makes a Powerful American Debut
It doesn’t much matter whether “Mother Economy,” the 19-minute film that went on view at New York’s Jewish Museum on July 1, is experimental cinema or video art. This modest exhibition, continuously screening in the 300-square-foot Goodkind Media Center through October 23 and marking the American debut of Israeli artist Maya Zack, is a powerfully…
-
Revivifying Identity
Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy By Natan Sharansky, with Shira Wolosky Weiss PublicAffairs, 304 pages, $26.95. Everyone knows something terrible is happening. This much seems self-evident. There were the attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by the incomplete overthrow of the Taliban, followed by the invasion of Iraq, set against the backdrop…
-
Embracing Human Complexity, at Life’s Most Painful Moments
For some time now, I’ve been meaning to comment on the variety of ways by which contemporary American Jews have redefined the tradition of sitting shiva, from reducing its length to three days — and, in some instances, even to just one day — from seven, to removing the ritual practice from the precincts of…
-
A General Guide to a Specific Kind of Judaism
Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism By Rebecca T. Alpert The New Press, 192 pages, $23.95. The general thesis of Rebecca Alpert’s new book, “Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism,” is that the old saying about two Jews and three opinions contains more than a seed of truth. Alpert cycles back…
-
Training a Lens on Israel’s Female Soldiers
Serial No. 3817131 By Rachel Papo Powerhouse Books, 128 pages, $39.95. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child proclaims that its signatory states “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited…
-
August 8, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The Forward received a heartbreaking letter from the two young Volotshinsky sisters, 6-year-old Hinde and 4-year-old Gishe, addressed to their father, who abandoned them and their mother in a shtetl near Minsk nearly five years ago: “Dear Father, we’re sending you a photograph of us so you can see…
-
The Meaning of Khnyok
‘Growing up in Israel,” Anna Choder Hampton of Minneapolis writes, “I would hear my parents, both secular Jews (my mother from Poland and my father from Ukraine), use the word ‘chnyok’ — uttered with great disdain — when referring to ultra-Orthodox Hasidim. What exactly does ‘chnyok’ mean? In what language is it?” Khnyok — it’s…
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
