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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Neither and Both
l An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry Volume 1: 1801-1953 Volume 2: 1953-2001 Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer M.E. Sharpe, 1,376 pages, $225. The ideal anthology is now, one would think, impossible. Not aiming for the compleat condition as established by the encyclopedia (18th century), biographical dictionary…
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How a Biographer Repaid One of History’s Debts
In 1997, while scanning the books clamoring for attention in the literary editor’s closet at The Jerusalem Post, Haim Chertok, an occasional reviewer for that paper, noted a festshrift — a collection of commemorative essays — marking the centenary of the birth of an Anglican priest, James Parkes. Chertok had read two books that Parkes…
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Auschwitz Unlocked
Seeking the “lingering presence” that exists in empty spaces that once contained human life, 37-year-old photographer Simon Watson recently traveled to Auschwitz, where, after months of correspondence with museum officials, he received authorization to photograph areas that had never been seen by the public. Watson — a New York-based fine arts and Getty Images photographer…
The Latest
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July 6, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Louis Bernstein, a doctor formerly in the employ of New York’s Beth Israel Hospital, arrived at the editorial offices of the Forward this week, clutching an open letter to the directors of the hospital. In the letter, Bernstein charged that the hospital’s patients were mistreated in such a manner…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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:…
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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 An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Yiddish „צײַטזאָנע“ — אַ ציקל לידער פֿון דזשייק שנײַדער‘Time Zone’ — poetry by Jake Schneider
דער מחבר איז אַן אַמעריקאַנער־געבוירענער ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסט, פּאָעט און איבערזעצער אין בערלין.