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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A Bur in the Talmudist’s Side
Forward reader Kenny Steinman writes: “In a recent Talmud lesson, my friends and I came across the Hebrew term bur in the sense of an unlettered person or ignoramus. Might this be related to the biblical ba’ar, as in the verse in Psalms that begins, Ish ba’ar lo yeda, ‘The dull man does not know’?…
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First Night Yid Vid: In Israel, Even the Monkeys Celebrate Hanukkah
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On Elvis Presley’s Birthday, The Jewish Elvis Who Stalked Michael Moore
Willard Morgan is Jelvis — “the Jewish Elvis.” True, he’s not the only Jewish Elvis. In fact, he isn’t even the only “Jelvis.” But, it seems safe to say, Morgan is the only Jewish Elvis (or Jelvis, for that matter) who has stalked filmmaker Michael Moore. When he’s not busy channeling “the King” in songs…
The Latest
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November 30, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward In last week’s Forward, a letter from Cyrus Sulzburger was printed. In it, he complained that we had wrongly editorialized against the Jewish Territorialist Organization plan to settle Jewish immigrants in the south and west of the country, because conditions for working people were so bad. This week, the…
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The Show Goes On: Venerable Argentinean Playhouse Celebrates 75 Years
The Asociación Israelita Argentina Pro Arte Idischer Folks Teater marked its 75th anniversary last month, a reminder that Buenos Aires once was, with Moscow, Warsaw and New York, a pillar of the Yiddish stage. Most of Buenos Aires’s Yiddish playhouses vanished by 1960, but the show goes on at the IFT, even if the performances…
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The Art of Recovery
The hauntingly beautiful, large-scale black-and-white works that made up Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furunes’s recent American solo debut are instantly arresting. Viewers are confronted by faces of anonymous women, closely cropped but reproduced to measure more than 5 feet by 7 feet, each with a penetrating gaze of melancholy and defiance, bewilderment and resignation. Approaching more…
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When Rites Go Wrong
Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933 By Robin Judd One of the historian’s most important tasks is to teach us things we do not know. One significant form this can take is to complicate our understanding of the past by helping us re-imagine how events unfolded. It is too…
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As Winter Falls, a Time To Learn From the Orthodox
As daylight-saving time ends and the winter approaches in earnest, Shabbat begins to be inconvenient again. In the northeastern United States, it now begins at four, even three in the afternoon Friday, early enough to encroach on the workday, and render the day a little bit useless. For families with children, the Sabbath now starts…
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Director Focuses on the Legacy of Muslim Slavery
‘The Film Class” could be the most important small film that almost nobody will ever see. Set in the Bedouin town of Rahat in the Israeli Negev, the film, which was shown earlier this month at the Boston Jewish Film Festival and at The Other Israel Film Festival in New York, follows Israeli filmmaker Uri…
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A Domestic Portrait, With Voices Hushed
Matrimony By Joshua Henkin Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $23.95. Not a great deal actually happens in “Matrimony,” the new novel by Joshua Henkin. Julian Wainwright, a WASP from Manhattan, meets Mia Mendelsohn, a Jewish girl from Montreal, at Graymont College, a fictional liberal-arts school. The narrative follows the couple from their awkward, charming undergraduate romance…
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Back to the Lower East Side
After 20 years of renovation, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, a National Historic Landmark, is now open to the public. The Eldridge Street Project’s restoration campaign is set to finish just before a second inauguration this week, capping an $18 million effort that brought together support from the City of New York and more than 18,000…
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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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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
In Case You Missed It
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News Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls
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Fast Forward Michael Jackson biopic revives legend of Jewish music mogul who battled MTV’s ‘color barrier’
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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