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
-
Israel’s ‘Golden Boy’: A New Biography Explores How It Is We Came To Forget Yigal Allon
Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography By Anita Shapira Translated by Evelyn Abel University of Pennsylvania Press, 392 pages, $49.95. At the end of the Israeli War of Independence, no military leader was better known than Yigal Allon. A former commander of the elite Palmach unit, Allon, a broad-shouldered sabra, coordinated the battles for the…
-
A Dictionary of Criminous Thought: Roberto Bolaño’s Compendium of Nazi Collaborationist Writing
Nazi Literature in the Americas By Roberto Bolaño Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews New Directions, 280 pages, $23.95. Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was a Trotskyite, drug addict, vagabond and expatriate. He wanted to be what capitalism might call “an experimental poet,” but instead became Chile’s greatest novelist. Bolaño seems to have summarized his own…
-
Photographing Icarus
For 200 cigarettes and a kilo of coffee, David Rubinger bought his first Leica camera. It was Germany, 1946. Rubinger, a young Viennese refugee serving in England’s Jewish Brigade, got to work immediately, photographing postwar devastation. These were the first shots in a long career of documentary photography. It was a career whose philosophy was…
The Latest
-
A Tale of Modesty and Bravery
For a change, this is not going to be a column about language. It’s going to be about modesty and bravery. Two weeks ago, you’ll recall, I wrote about the Yiddish word gikh, “fast,” after receiving a letter from a correspondent signed “Brodetzky” who mentioned, in two tantalizingly brief sentences, having given some uncomprehending German…
-
The Nazi Cowboy: A New Exhibit Explores the Life and Work of Billy Jenkins
The photograph is bizarre and disturbing: A broadly grinning middle-aged man, dressed in full cowboy regalia, strides across a stage. In one hand, he brandishes a wide-brimmed cowboy hat; in the other, he holds aloft a big Nazi swastika topped by an eagle spreading its wings. The man in the picture was known as Billy…
-
MC Citizen: Israeli Rapper Subliminal Tours Stateside
Imagine a rap mogul — Eminem, say, or Jay-Z — playing the role of cultural ambassador: praising the work of police officers, telling the youth of the country to be patriotic citizens, smiling at fans from the steps of the White House. Such is the case with Ya’akov Shimoni, aka Subliminal, the Israeli rap sensation…
-
Survival Ode: Fred Wander’s Wartime Story
The Seventh Well By Fred Wander Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann W.W. Norton, 192 pages, $23.95. Fritz Rosenblatt was born in 1917 to Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Vienna, and died as Fred Wander in Vienna in 2006; his adopted surname was meant to describe the years in between. He spent his adolescence revisiting the…
-
Side by Side: Irish and Jews in American Theater
Last fall, two Broadway shows by Jewish-Irish collaborators, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s “The Glorious Ones” and Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan’s “Young Frankenstein,” opened on Broadway. These ethnic pairings would have no more significance than a Gallagher and Shean sketch were it not for the fact that the two groups have intersected again and…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Unarmed man who tackled Bondi Beach Hanukkah attacker identified as Ahmed al-Ahmed
- 2
Fast Forward First Puka Nacua, now Mookie Betts: Why do sports stars keep getting antisemitic around a Jewish streamer?
- 3
Fast Forward After MIT professor’s killing, Jewish influencers spread unverified antisemitism claim
- 4
Opinion I grew up believing Australia was the best place to be Jewish. This Hanukkah shooting forces a reckoning I do not want.
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion The Gaza hostage crisis could forever change how American Jews relate to Israel — but it’s not too late to fix that
-
Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
-
Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
-
Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
