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
-
Judeo-English, Part III
In response to my previous two columns on “Judeo-English,” Sarah Bunin Benor, a linguist and assistant professor of Jewish studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, has sent me a paper, not yet published, that she has written on the same subject. In it she concludes (as I did) that such…
-
June 29, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward The situation on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side is terrible. The entire population is threatened with illness because of a sanitation workers’ strike. The neighborhood’s sidewalks are piled high with overflowing ash cans, and rotting garbage is sizzling in the summer heat. Making matters worse, the Sanitation…
-
How One Artist Found Inspiration in the Margins Of Ancient Hebrew Books
Doodlers, beware. Your scribbles could outlive — and outshine — you. Artist Zeva Oelbaum has found inspiration in the endpapers of 18th- and 19th-century Hebrew books, transforming doodles made by Central and Eastern European students in the bindings of their seforim into richly toned gelatin silver prints. The fragmented images are largely indecipherable, but they…
The Latest
-
What Rorty Wrought
Richard Rorty’s death on June 8, at the age of 75, cut short a unique philosophical career. His influence on the intellectual scene of the final quarter of the 20th century can hardly be exaggerated. Rorty’s name is, indeed, known far and wide. But his influence extended far beyond the circles of those who knew…
-
Hunting in Zimbabwe For Identity And Family
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun By Peter Godwin Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $24.99. Last August, I visited an elderly Jewish couple at their spacious apartment in an affluent neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa. A distant family friend had referred to them as people who would welcome the opportunity to take me out…
-
Everything I Know About Being Bad I Learned in Hebrew School
Once upon a time, I thought a quintessential feature of being Jewish involved asking questions. But I learned early on that challenging the Modern Orthodox rules of my upbringing meant I would be considered a rebel and a troublemaker. Maybe I was born into the wrong tribe, or at least the wrong family, but 613…
-
Bridge to Bukhara
On an auspicious day in the late 1980s, New York-based photographer Joan Roth decided to visit Bukhara in the former Soviet Union to photograph the centuries-old Jewish community there. The community’s relative isolation from the greater Jewish world and their constant and historic struggle against Muslim oppression had resulted in a unique set of traditions:…
-
Ravensbruck’s Famous Survivor
Fiorello’s Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck’s Story Edited by Rochelle G. Saidel By Gemma La Guardia Gluck Syracuse University Press, 184 pages, $16.95. Back in the 1980s, a number of Holocaust scholars and “people who should know better” told historian Rochelle Saidel that Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp located about 60 miles north of Berlin,…
-
Judeo-English, Part II
Last week’s column, which started with an e-mail from Irving Treitel that despaired of the possibility of a distinct American Jewish language, ended with the question of whether, considered lexically, phonetically and grammatically, there actually is already such a thing as “Judeo-English” in the sense that there were once dialects of “Judeo-Italian,” “Judeo-Arabic,” etc. With…
-
Books Worst… Book Title… Ever
Wondering what the book’s about? Fortunately, there’s this informative back-cover testimonial from Stanford literature professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Reading the texts of a culture that could only achieve its Germanness by being so utterly Jewish, along the lines of the 20th-century’s terminal mass migrations, Todd Presner’s book opens our 21st-century eyes to a new way…
-
June 22, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Jacob Radin (nee Nokhem Radovski), a 35-year-old seltzer delivery man, was murdered this week while driving on his route in the Harlem area of New York City. As Radin was driving his truck Wednesday night, two crooks stole two cases of seltzer from it. Radin went looking around the…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Unarmed man who tackled Bondi Beach Hanukkah attacker identified as Ahmed al-Ahmed
- 2
Fast Forward First Puka Nacua, now Mookie Betts: Why do sports stars keep getting antisemitic around a Jewish streamer?
- 3
Fast Forward After MIT professor’s killing, Jewish influencers spread unverified antisemitism claim
- 4
Opinion I grew up believing Australia was the best place to be Jewish. This Hanukkah shooting forces a reckoning I do not want.
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion His family was killed in Sydney. Hours later, he helped feed 600 unhoused people in LA.
-
Fast Forward Yehuda Kaploun confirmed by Senate as Trump’s antisemitism envoy
-
Holy Ground One of America’s first Jewish farms was nearly lost to history. Now these Brooklyn parents are risking everything to keep their family’s legacy alive.
-
Fast Forward Liberal Zionist groups criticize Trump administration’s travel ban on those with Palestinian Authority passports
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
