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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Music
Rabbis Against Concerts
I’m a little late to the game on this one, so I’ll summarize in brief: A couple weeks ago the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Hamodia published a statement from 33 ultra-Orthodox rabbis — including some of the American haredi community’s most respected figures — prohibiting attendance at a planned charity fund-raising concert at Madison Square Garden’s WaMu…
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My Father’s Words
This month, during the first yahrzeit of my father, Mordkhe Schaechter, of blessed memory, I recalled a story my father used to tell us about his paternal grandfather, Reb Itsye Mordkhe — a shokhet (slaughterer) who was not very popular among the butchers of the shtetl because whenever he rendered one of their animals treyf,…
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Music Matisyahu’s New ’Do
Reggae sensation Matisyahu made waves last year when he revealed that he was no longer affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect. Since then, he has been davening at a shul affiliated with the Karliner Hasidim, who are known for screaming their prayers. Now, it appears, his new spiritual orientation is starting to show in his…
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Hip Hop’s Unlikely Portraitists
Two Jewish baby boomers — who live on opposite sides of the country and have never met — have both, on the advice of their sons, turned to the hip-hop community for artistic fodder. Although neither is comfortable being labeled a Jewish artist, New York-based painter Alex Melamid recognizes a major Jewish presence in hip…
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Bingo’s Sacred History
When it comes to raising money, we have all sorts of sophisticated devices at our disposal: market research, parlor meetings, silent auctions, lavish dinners with celebrated speakers and a “development” staff at the ready. Earlier generations had the Yom Kippur Appeal and bingo. A board game whose objective was to cover five numbers straight in…
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O, Landsman, Where Art Thou?
First there was bluegrass, then there was newgrass and now, perhaps inevitably, there is Jewgrass. It’s not yet a trend. Call it a development. You can find it in New York, Denver and suburban Washington, D.C. It’s still rare enough to sound like a high-concept gag — Jed Clampett in a tallis — but it’s…
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Who Were the Assyrians?
If I were provident, I’d save this letter, which arrived some two months ago, until December. But who can wait so long? So here it is now, from John Miller of Bryan, Texas: “Every year it happens. As December arrives, our local newspaper prints a Hanukkah article, either as a compulsion to be ‘inclusive,’ or…
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At the L.A. Opera, a Lifelong History Project
When the music director of the Los Angeles Opera, James Conlon, presented “Der Zerbrochene Krug” (“The Broken Jug”) on a recent Sunday afternoon, it marked the first time that an American audience had seen the one-act comedy composed by Viktor Ullmann, a Czech Jew who was dragged off to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later…
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March 14, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The wedding of Leo Jacobs and Gussie Goldman, which took place this past Sunday in Brooklyn, had an unusual feature: The couple’s chupah was held up by 12 people, none of them Jewish and all of them Brooklyn policemen. The police-chupah bearers were there on account of Jacobs’s previous…
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Film & TV Brooks and Black on Blondes and Bar Mitzvahs
The New York Post’s Page Six features these two celebrity quotes today: “”YES, I have always loved a good blonde, and who wouldn’t?” — Mel Brooks “PART of the bar mitzvah is that you become a man supposedly at 13 years old. And as I was a man, I decided never to go to a…
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Unterzakhn, Part 1
Read the first installment of Leela Corman’s new graphic novel, “Unterzakhn,” which is being serialized in the Forward: CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
