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
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
The Latest
-
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…
-
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…
-
April 11, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The New York City Police Department is making mass arrests of anarchists and socialists on Manhattan’s Lower East Side after a bomb killed three people and injured dozens at a demonstration in Union Square last weekend. Among those killed was undercover police detective Irving Rasky, who apparently was trying…
-
Of Domestic Sorceresses and Noisy Beggars
Fred Emil Katz writes from Baltimore: “I have long been struck by the fact that Yiddish has an assortment of words for incompetent men, such as shlemiel, shmegege, and shlimazel, to name just a few. The culture that produced such epithets was one in which men might spend their entire adult lives pursuing a career…
-
Film & TV Woody Allen v. American Apparel
The holy rebbe is pissed. Last spring, trendy underwear maker American Apparel, known for its sexually charged advertising, put up a pair of billboard ads that were unusually tame. The billboards, in Los Angeles and New York, featured an image of Woody Allen dressed as a Hasidic Jew from his masterpiece Annie Hall, alongside Yiddish…
-
Unterzakhn, Part 5
Read this week’s installment of Leela Corman’s new graphic novel, “Unterzakhn,” which is being serialized in the Forward. (Or, to start at the very beginning, click here). CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW
-
The Poet’s Art
Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886-1932) is best known as the most innovative and ironic of the modernist Yiddish poets. Closely associated with the group of poets known as Di Yunge (The Young Ones), Halpern was the author of several verse collections, including “In Nyu York” (“In New York”) and “Di Goldene Pave (“The Golden Peacock”). Less well…
-
For a Versatile Critic, All the World (Wide Web) is a Stage
The decade-old Internet revolution has radically changed the way in which we present ourselves to one another — sometimes deceitfully, often anonymously and not usually for the better. That’s one thesis in a new book by culture critic Lee Siegel, who knows of what he speaks. In 2006, Siegel was caught and suspended from The…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Culture ‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
- 2
Books In ‘Something We Said,’ Richard Pryor’s daughter finds words to discuss the unspeakable
- 3
Opinion It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
- 4
Opinion Progressive Jews are trying out post-Zionism. There’s one big flaw in their approach
In Case You Missed It
-
Culture The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
-
Opinion Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
-
Culture What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
-
News Abdul El-Sayed is courting Jewish voters — without moderating his views on Israel