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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Think ‘Fast’
Tantalizingly brief is a note from an e-mailer who identifies himself only as “Brodetzky,” no first name given. It says: “‘Mach gich!’ was my command to a platoon of German soldiers that had ambushed my battalion’s advance to the Rhine River in March 1945. We had outflanked and ambushed the ambushers, but they did not…
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Film & TV Borat, R.I.P.?
Will we be seeing much more of Borat, Sacha Caron Cohen’s uproariously un-P.C. Kazakh journalist character? It seems unlikely, judging from an interview that Baron Cohen gave to The Daily Telegraph. “When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so…
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December 21, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward In response to the storm of protest against Sholem Asch’s play, “God of Vengeance,” both Asch and his mentor, Y.L. Peretz, have sent letters to the Forward. Articles and letters that appeared in the daily newspaper Yidishes Tageblat, arguing that the play is pornographic and depraved, instigated protests. Asch…
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Going Green, McKinney Announces White House Bid
A former member of Congress who has had a famously combative relationship with the Jewish community is jumping into the presidential race. Former Rep. Cynthia McKinney — a former Democrat formerly of Georgia — has announced her intention to run for president with the Green Party. She made her announcement via video: McKinney joins a…
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R.B. Kitaj’s Final Draft
Second Diasporist Manifesto: A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses By R.B. Kitaj Yale University Press, 160 pages, with 41 black-and-white illustrations, $26. Mysticism is what happens when superstition is given a system. But when system and superstition become combined in mystical art — or in writing about such art — the…
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Struggling Yiddish Theater Finds a Home — Onscreen
It was not long ago that the streets of Tel Aviv and New York were packed with the sounds of the Yiddish language and its echo of exile, displacement and fortitude. For Dan Katzir, the Israeli director of the new documentary “Yiddish Theater: A Love Story,” the sounds of this language, and its disappearance, resonate…
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Family Reunion
Light Fell By Evan Fallenberg Soho Press, 229 pages, $22. Three times in the Babylonian Talmud we find the Aramaic expression nafal nehora — “light fell.” This is the light of a powerful physical beauty that behaves almost like matter, seemingly pulled down by gravitational force — a light that may kindle overwhelming desire. Sometimes…
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How I Finally Learned To Stop Worrying and Love (Okay, Like) Christmas
It’s hard to be a Jew on Christmas My friends won’t let me join in any games. And I can’t sing Christmas songs Or decorate a Christmas tree Or leave water out for Rudolph ’cause there’s something wrong with me! I’m a Jew, a lonely Jew, on Christmas. — Kyle Broflovski, “South Park” Like many…
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Picturing the Holy City
Talk about the dustbin of history: In 1989, an American photographer happened upon a garage sale in St. Paul, Minn., and left with a box of the earliest-known photographs of Jerusalem from the 19th century. Taken by Mendel Diness, a Jewish watchmaker in Jerusalem, the photographs are currently on exhibit — along with shots by…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Seasonal Greetings
In our last installment, we looked at the most common of all Yiddish greetings, shoolem alaykhem, and its inevitable response, alaykhem shoolem. As with virtually all Yiddish greetings, alaykhem shoolem is often, though not inevitably, followed by a challenge in the form of nu, which has a basic meaning of “so” or “well,” as if…
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Would One Name a Teddy Bear ‘Jesus’?
Sometimes things you have wondered idly about for years find their solution unexpectedly in passing. This is what happened to me recently while following the story of the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who was convicted in Sudan of the crime of letting her pupils call the class teddy bear “Mohammed.” My reflections on the fate…
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Fast Forward DOGE’s cuts to Jewish humanities grants were unconstitutional, judge rules
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Fast Forward As anti-LGBTQ laws spread, these two Jewish nonprofits are funding moves to safer states