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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Susan Sontag: Juggler of the Moral and the Aesthetic
At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches By Susan Sontag, Edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $23. In his foreword to “At the Same Time,” the new collection of essays and speeches by his mother, the late Susan Sontag, David Rieff writes: “It is sometimes said of my…
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A Window on the Western Wall
The Western Wall may be the holiest Jewish site, but it isn’t commonly associated with high art. It is more the province of sentimental pictures and tourist trinkets. “Solomon’s Wall,” a majestic painting that commanded $3,624,000 at Christie’s New York last month, was an exceptional example, an emotional rendering by a non-Jew who was Russia’s…
The Latest
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S. Yizhar’s Birth of a Nation
Preliminaries By S. Yizhar Translated by Nicholas de Lange The Toby Press, 312 pages, $24.95. A memoir of an extraordinary life written in an ordinary manner is no great memoir. A memoir of an ordinary life written in an extraordinary manner is no great memoir, either. But what of a memoir of an extraordinary life…
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Building a New Middle East — Through Soccer and Weight Loss
Coaches, take heart: Sports may promote peace. During the famous “Christmas Truce” of 1914, British and German soldiers called an unofficial cease-fire and played a game of soccer. In 1971, China and the United States came together over a game of table tennis. For the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, North and South Korean athletes competed…
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An Arts Space Rises by the Banks of Brooklyn’s Eerie Canal
From the outside, the structure resembles a fancy feed-storage bin: two converted oil silos overlooking Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. Inside, the space recalls a rustic lodge. But while the unique edifice may be what draws people to Issue Project Room, it’s what’s produced inside that gets people to stay — and return. Besides, as Suzanne Fiol,…
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Looking Back at the Year in Pictures
Fateless Hungary Director: Lajos Koltai Sophie Scholl: The Final Days Germany Director: Marc Rothemund The Syrian Bride Israel Director: Eran Riklis In an era in which choice threatens to overwhelm us, the overlooked film has become all too common. Jewish-themed films are, in this sense, doubly cursed. They cross into so many categories that unearthing…
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May 18, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward A small riot occurred in New York City on a Lexington Avenue streetcar near 30th Street when a young boy jumped on board without paying his fare. Upon finding the boy, the conductor, Richard Carney, caught him and began punching him in the head. An elderly passenger, one Shmuel…
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Film & TV Can’t Wait for ‘Magneto’ Flick (But What About ‘Kahane’?)
Great news. Variety recently reported that Marvel Studios and 20th Century Fox are moving forward with an “X-Men” spinoff — “Magneto,” the back story of the villain portrayed by Ian McKellen in the original trilogy. The film, according to Variety, will open with Magneto coming “to grips with his mutant ability to manipulate metal objects…
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Books The American Jewish Inexperience?
Sholom Aleichem, Bintel Blog readers. (Your turn: Aleichem, Sholom). I’m currently on tour promoting “A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward”, so my posting will be spotty for a little while. But here’s something that could keep you busy for some time. In the latest issue of The Nation,…
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Remembering ‘Hair’ and The Tangle of the 1960s
Although no one celebrates it, a historic date in the American calendar was marked two weeks ago. On April 29, 1968, the musical that encapsulated the mood and spirit of the 1960s opened on Broadway. “Hair” both shocked and titillated its audiences with its in-your-face rejection of the values of the older generation, encouraging young…
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Judaism and the Culture of Outburst
It feels like we’re “Falling Down” again. Fourteen years ago, Michael Douglas’s badly coiffed Everyman captured a cultural moment of impotent white rage: Furious at downsizing, outsourcing and the increasing falseness of American life, but powerless to stop any of it, Douglas’s character finally snaps — and we watched, mostly sympathetically. That year, 1993, came…
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