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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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Etiquette Maven Minds Your Manners
By day, Lorie Rudolph disguises herself as an unassuming insurance agent. “It has to pay the bills,” she said of her job. But come nights and weekends, the 53-year-old from Fayetteville, N.Y., transforms herself into the Jewish Etiquette Maven. Two years ago, Rudolph created an etiquette-training program, JewishEM, to teach children and young adults how…
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To Bore No More: Educators Share Their Best Ideas
Across the country, individual communities have developed initiatives aimed at improving Jewish congregational schools. Now, a new organization, the Partnership for Effective Learning and Innovative Education, is bringing together educators to help those communities share their most successful efforts. Rabbi Nathan Laufer, founding director of Pelie, said, “We are in business because there are hundreds…
The Latest
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Donor Saves L.A. Yiddish Program
A major contribution from an anonymous donor will allow a pilot program that teaches Yiddish to Los Angeles high-school students to survive. Yiddishkayt Los Angeles, a not-for-profit organization devoted to furthering Yiddish in the area, recently received an unsolicited $250,000 gift earmarked for a program that aims to bring Yiddish-language classes into high schools. “It’s…
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Middlebury To Launch New School Of Hebrew
Visit Middlebury College’s language schools this summer, and you can cheer at a Portuguese soccer game, observe a Chinese cooking class or watch Russian television. Visit next summer, however, and you will be able to order falafel in Hebrew and dance to Israeli folksongs. Middlebury College and Brandeis University have teamed up to create the…
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Playing the Part of ‘Rav’ for San Francisco’s Karaite Community
By day, Joe Pessah is a marketing applications manager for a tech company in California’s Silicon Valley. In his spare time, however, the 62-year-old Mountain View resident pursues a much more unusual vocation. Pessah is the “acting rav” for America’s largest Karaite community, made up of members of a now-tiny Jewish sect that parted ways…
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Out of Egypt
Lucette Lagnado, a former editor at the Forward and currently a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, recently took it upon herself to unearth the full details of her family’s 1962 exodus from Egypt. The resulting book, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit” (Ecco), tells the story of a family torn from its beloved…
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The Death of Genuine Dissent
Last month, noted legal scholar Noah Feldman set off a firestorm of controversy with his screed against Modern Orthodox Judaism in the New York Times Magazine. The story has by now been hashed and rehashed in other newspapers, on blogs, in heated conversations: Feldman discovers, to his dismay, that he and his non-Jewish girlfriend were…
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City Boy
Leonard Michaels: Collected Stories Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 403 pages, $26. Melrose was the last kosher delicatessen in my Brooklyn neighborhood, Brighton Beach. It closed this past spring. Its window was shuttered, and a sign was hung, informing all that the business had moved to the Long Island suburb of Cedarhurst. After 1989, Brighton Beach,…
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Middle East Abattoir
Director Ami Dayan doesn’t want to start a rumble. Launching a New York production after a (relatively) small-town success in Boulder, Colo., is already enough of a campaign; he has nothing to gain from starting a ruckus, as well. So Dayan’s approach to the current remount of “Masked”— a play about Palestinians, written by Israeli…
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Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend
At a lecture that sculptor Louise Nevelson once gave at Queens College, a meticulous student raised her hand and offered her summary of Nevelson’s work. “Your work is black and it is wood and it is sculpture.” “If that’s what it appears like to you, then you’ve missed the whole thing,” Nevelson replied. The Jewish…
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Master of Reading
Gilad J. Gevaryahu writes to ask my opinion of a grammatical error in Hebrew that he noticed has been spreading in Orthodox religious circles in recent years. It goes back, he points out, to a mistake that was common in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, one that no longer seems mistaken to most people, because it has…
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