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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CONTRASTING LANDSCAPES
Known for his bold brushstrokes and vibrant colors, Michael Kovner creates paintings that offer lush images of Israeli scenery. An expansive beach dotted with red umbrellas, piles of yellow haystacks casting moody shadows in the sunlight and a blunt portrait of a lemon tree ripe with fruit are among his subjects. In Kovner’s new exhibition,…
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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…
The Latest
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Nice Jewish Boy Turns Bad, Gets Role
Sometimes the most creative acting gets done off-camera. Take Scott Cohen, whom big- and small-screen audiences will recognize from the television shows “Gilmore Girls” and “Law & Order: Trial by Jury,” the film “Kissing Jessica Stein” and, most famously, “The 10th Kingdom,” NBC’s seven-hour fantasy narrative in which he played the half-man, half-wolf lead. When…
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A Witness To His Time
‘A filmmaker must be a witness of his times,” said great French director Jean-Pierre Melville, widely acknowledged as the grandfather of the French New Wave, in an interview about his 1969 movie, “Army of Shadows.” The film, a gloomy existentialist set piece of espionage that details the heroism of French partisans in the face of…
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Looking Back May 5, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD New York City’s Lower East Side has been flooded with fliers that denounce the Forward. “We Galician Jews hereby protest the Forward for the insult they printed, saying that Galitzianers are shnorrers.” The flier, which is signed by “The Committee,” demands an apology. We would like to ask just…
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Etgar Keret’s Unlikely Landscape
The Nimrod Flip-out By Etgar Keret Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 176 pages, $12. * * *| Etgar Keret’s fame in Israel is as unlikely as one of his own stories: A young writer of ultrashort, ultramodern fictions produces four straight best-selling collections. The stories in his collections go on to be translated into 16 languages…
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The Jewish Goddess, Past and Present
‘The Da Vinci Code,” soon to be a major motion picture, is an old tale in new clothing: It is the story of the goddess, sometimes referred to as the “Divine Feminine,” the female aspect of — or counterpart to — the familiar male God of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. In Dan Brown’s phenomenal…
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Humbly Going About His Work
Jules Olitski, the subject of an exhibit opening May 10 at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at the George Washington University, has been compared to nearly every artist in the canon — Rembrandt, Frederic Edwin Church, Picasso, Hans Hoffman, El Greco — as well as deemed the newest painting god to emerge from the…
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The Incidental Advantage
Daniel C. Dennett’s recent book, “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” (2006), is a fascinating volume, but it is not my purpose here either to review it or even to try to summarize its highly original approach to what one might call the biology of religions — how they grow, develop, adapt and…
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Looking Back April 28, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD “Freedom is the Jews’ messiah,” said Russian writer Maksim Gorky, who is currently in New York. In a speech at the Grand Palais coliseum, Gorky described the importance of the Jews to the Russian revolutionary movement and how the Russian government has fomented antisemitism. He said that it was…
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Donald Fagen Completes His Trilogy
A ghostly presence with unknown intent has descended. The new album “Morph the Cat” isn’t so much a feline as a feeling — and a happy one at that, as the title song says, “bringing joy to New York City, Christmas without the chintzy stuff.” But don’t be fooled. With his musical partner of nearly…
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Most Popular
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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?
In Case You Missed It
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Culture How a Jewish reporter like me got addicted to Christian media
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Opinion Israeli leaders are using Holocaust comparisons to justify attacks on Iran. Is that kosher?
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Fast Forward Over half of Jewish students at Columbia experienced discrimination and exclusion after Oct. 7, survey shows
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Fast Forward Journalist board of Shtetl, news site covering haredi Orthodoxy, resigns after founder renounces mission
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