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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Remembering Bobby Fischer
Unquestionably the most famous chess player in the history of the royal game, Bobby Fischer died last month at the age of 64 — the exact number of squares on the chessboard. His lively games will be remembered for as long as the game is played. “Chess is life,” Fischer used to say. But, alas,…
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Tracking Kasztner’s Train
Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust By Anna Porter Walker & Company, 464 pages, $27.95. Why are thousands of non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust memorialized in Yad Vashem, while the one Jew who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews is virtually forgotten? This is the moral injustice that…
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Yelling Melodiously
It is no easy feat to yell melodiously, but the Jewish rock quartet The Shondes has achieved just that. The screams on their new album, “The Red Sea,” sound ancient and somewhat cantorial, piping in from the Old Testament to talk to us about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, misogyny, Bible tales and intimacy. Sonically, the music…
The Latest
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‘Arab Jew,’ Part II
I have received two long letters arguing with my column of two weeks ago, in which I objected to the term “Arab Jew.” Here are parts of them. From Jack Warga of Boynton Beach, Fla.: My family lived for at least 150, and probably several hundred, years in Poland. I spoke Polish and attended a…
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Clash and Learn
Tova Hartman, co-founder of the “halakhic, egalitarian” Jerusalem synagogue Shira Hadasha, is a familiar voice to many readers of these pages. She has been active in various organizations, including the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, where she is an outspoken critic of what she refers to as the “hijacking” of the discourse around feminism in the…
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February 8, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Esther Shpiz, a 60-year-old resident of Hester Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was on her way to visit her friend, Becky Shupinski, who lives nearby in an Orchard Street tenement. After trudging up to Shupinski’s fifth-floor apartment, Esther walked over to the hallway window to get a breath…
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Film & TV Neurotics of the World Unite!: Larry David To Star in Woody Allen’s Next Film
Entertainment Weekly reports: Larry David, the mind behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, is set to be the lead in Woody Allen’s next, as-yet-untitled feature, which is scheduled to shoot in New York City in the spring. Plot details are being kept under wraps, but David will act alongside Evan Rachel Wood. E.W. notes that…
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Extraordinary Nostalgia
Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography – the German and Early American Years By Joachim Prinz Edited and introduced by Michael A. Meyer Indiana University Press, 270 pages, $34.95 When it comes to portraying rabbinical figures, Philip Roth has not been the kindest writer around. Yet in his 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” a…
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Schnorientalism: The Tao of Jews
As even the most tenuous speaker of Chinese can tell you, travels in that country mean having the same Inevitable Conversation over and over. And over. “Oh!” the locals will pretend to swoon. “Your Chinese is excellent!” “No, no,” comes your polite or honest reply. “It’s really nothing.” “Where are you from?” “What is your…
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Composing the Exile: Steve Bernstein’s Latest ‘Diaspora’ Album
Not many musicians appear both on the experimental jazz scene and in Anheuser-Busch ads, but then again, trumpeter Steve Bernstein is not your average musician. A polymath with prodigious chops, Bernstein — who in addition to composing is an arranger for pop albums, children’s TV shows and movie soundtracks — has been gigging some 34…
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Aleksander Skidan Sees ‘Red’
Aleksander Skidan has a talent that, like his nose, is poetically bent — left of center, pensively down-turned and seriously humorous. A poet and essayist by nature, and a translator by necessity, he is one of the foremost Russian writers of his turbulent generation. He was born in Leningrad in 1965 and lives in the…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
