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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Horn of Plenty
It’s rarely wise to single out a particular group of instrumentalists — saxophonists, pianists, laptop artists — as an engine of change in a given genre. Doing so usually just means you’ll end up ignoring the vast numbers of other people doing equally interesting work. Still, some things are hard to ignore. So if I…
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Israel, in Polyethylene and Concrete
The Girl on the FridgeBy Etgar Keret Translated from the Hebrew by MiriamShlesinger and Sondra Silverston Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $12. Since its rebirth as a modern language, Hebrew has undergone a metamorphosis, from the closed but immensely rich language of sacred literature — with all the references and reverences and books within…
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Painting Apartheid’s Silhouette
William Kentridge’s tapestry, “Porter Series: Géographie des Hebreux ou Tableau de la dispersion des Enfants de Noë” (2005), shows two silhouetted figures, with their respective heads replaced by a rotary telephone and a megaphone, walking over a map of southern Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. The map mostly follows Genesis’s account of the…
The Latest
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What We Talk About When We Talk About God
A Touch of the Sacred: A Theologian’s Informal Guide to Jewish Belief By Eugene B. Borowitz and Frances W. Schwartz Jewish Lights Publishing, 256 pages, $21.99. A few years ago, I met a young man actively involved in the minyan movement in New York City. He was excited to tell me about how Jews of…
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Yiddish To Ease a Worried Mind: A Forverts Scrapbook
From April to November of last year, the Museum of the City of New York featured an exhibit on the history of the Forward. When Jaime Rubin, director of medical research at Columbia University walked through the show over the summer, she realized that her family also had a contribution: her grandfather’s Forverts clippings scrapbook,…
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Retracing Columbus’s Steps and Finding a Novel Path
Claims that Christopher Columbus was Jewish have been circulating for years, though they’ve generally been confined to the rarified realms of medieval history departments and those few obsessed with the Discoveries period. Even Simon Wiesenthal believed Columbus was a Jew; in 1973, he published a book on the explorer, “Sails of Hope,” and quipped that…
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Holiday Cheer
Who better to ask about great wines for Passover than people who buy wine for a living? At the Israwinexpo 2008 in Tel Aviv, I tasted kosher wine with a diverse group of buyers for American-based retailers, including HEB Kosher Store, Best Cellars, A&P Liquor, BevMax and Skyview. Israel is emerging as a high-quality wine…
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A Kid-Friendly Seder
Purim is funny. Passover, not so much. My kids always have a hard time transitioning out of Purim, with its nutso kid-friendly awesomeness. Grandma Betsy’s chocolate hamentashen will always trump leaden macaroons and The Jellied Fruit Slices of Doom. And this year, Josie was old enough to groove along to our shul’s Purim shpiel, “The…
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My Chosen People
Last spring, I celebrated Passover at the Seward Park Housing Corporation on Grand Street in Manhattan, a few blocks from where my grandmother grew up, above her father’s tailor shop in the 1920s. While the matzo ball soup simmered on the stove, my friends and I gathered in the dining room. The only thing distinguishing…
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Food Freedom: A Celiac’s Passover Story
Tell a Jew you have celiac disease, and the response is almost always: “So like Passover, but year-round?” Yes, I reply, but without the matzo. Indeed, life with celiac disease — the autoimmune deficiency in which gluten, the proteins found in wheat, rye, oats, barley and malt, cannot be tolerated — is much like Passover…
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A Very Sweet Seder
As miracles go, it’s hard to trump the parting of the Red Sea. But there’s something miraculous about the fact that a box of chocolate truffles made in a Boston suburb and ordered by Norma and Alvin Hass near Chicago will, once again, grace the Seder table of their daughter and her family in Eagle…
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