Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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French Writers’ New Renaissance
In Lieu of Memory: Contemporary Jewish Writing in France By Thomas Nolden Syracuse University Press, 264 pages, $29.95. * * *| I n the novels of Patrick Modiano, one of his famous peers, a leading French Jewish writer once told me to look for something: telephone books. The advice seemed strange at the time: What…
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Woman of Letters, Woman of the World
‘Femme de lettres” — “woman of letters” — is how Sybille Bedford once listed her profession on a customs form, following a conceit suggested to her by Aldous Huxley years before she found success as a writer of travelogues, novels and court-trial journalism. But in truth, Bedford — a renowned novelist, journalist and biographer who…
The Latest
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Cycles of Poverty
WASHINGTON, D.C. —A woman holding a placard stating “Behar, Leviticus 25” marched down the center aisle of the United States Senate, disrupting this afternoon’s session. As Senators scurried to hide beneath their seats, the protester paced before the podium for five minutes until Capitol police, guns drawn, surrounded her. Only after one Izzy Cohen, a…
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Looking Back May 12, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Men, women, boys and girls appeared by the dozens at New York City’s Essex Street Police Station, carrying baskets of cats and kittens that they left in the waiting room. Little by little, the felines began to creep out of the baskets and walk around. The station’s sergeant, James…
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Disjointed Poetry
When Heidi Latsky was 11 years old, her mother suffered a meningioma, a brain tumor that led to her slow and ultimately fatal physical decline. For the next 35 years, the odyssey that Latsky, her family and her mother experienced until her death in 2004 elicited a maze of thoughts, memories and emotions. From May…
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A Bohemian Poet Seen in Rare Spotlight
New and Selected Poems By Samuel Menashe, edited by Christopher Ricks Library of America, 191 pages, $20. * * *| Samuel Menashe might well be the most recognized unrecognized American poet of the past 40 years. Although his first book appeared in England in 1961, he was not able to find an American publisher for…
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Putting Together the Pieces of a Sculptor’s Life and Work
Rebecca Spence For the first 10 years of artist Eva Hesse’s life, her father, Wilhelm, recorded in a series of painstakingly detailed diaries the everyday events that constituted her childhood. Interweaving photographs, text and newspaper clippings, his artfully collaged books — known in German as tägebucher — were intended to serve as a legacy for…
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The End of the World as We Know It
Lenny Bruce Is Dead By Jonathan Goldstein Counterpoint, 193 pages, $13. Lenny Bruce died in 1966 at the age of 40, from a morphine overdose in his home in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. Like Elvis would a little more than a decade later, Bruce died in the bathroom, which is both funny…
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KGB Confidential: Unearthing a Hero of Soviet Jewry
There is a long-standing tradition among the Russian intelligentsia of honoring one’s intellectual heroes by prominently displaying their image for all to see. In a place where others might put family portraits, the Russian physicist has a photo of the professor who trained him; the poet stares up at Mandelstam or Brodsky. When I went…
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Clothes Maketh the Man?
In a great metropolis, two gentlemen meet outside a large store that specializes in photographic and video equipment. They are both dressed soberly, one in the familiar navy-blue business suit, the other in a black caftan and a round cap with a thick fur brim and old-fashioned shoes, as well. Yehuda: Naftali! How are you?…
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Video Artist Presents a Reinterpretation of Scripture
It takes some kind of chutzpah to announce at your wedding that you’re going to rewrite Deuteronomy because you find it offensive. But what kind of person turns such a wedding proclamation into an art exhibit? Melissa Shiff — a postmodern Canadian Jewish performance artist who was married by a secular humanist rabbi at a…
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Fast Forward Rep. Max Miller says driver called him a ‘dirty Jew’ and threatened to kill his family. A local doctor turned himself in.
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News An Alabama millionaire offered Jews $50,000 to move to his town. 16 years later, what’s left?
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Culture Why is Israel’s attack on Iran called ‘Rising Lion’ — and what does the Bible have to do with it?
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News As Israel attacks, what is life like for Jews in Iran?
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Fast Forward Journalist board of Shtetl, news site covering haredi Orthodoxy, resigns after founder renounces mission
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BINTEL BRIEF What would you do with gold teeth said to be from Holocaust victims?
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Fast Forward Rep. Max Miller says driver called him a ‘dirty Jew’ and threatened to kill his family. A local doctor turned himself in.
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