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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Stereotype This! Introducing Ethnic Superheroes
Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob. Eventually, Noah begat Shem and, in due course, nerdy Jewish kids begat superheroes. In 1933, two nebbishes named Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel created Superman (birth name “Kal-El,” Hebrew for “All God”), and since then it’s been a source of pride that Jews created the culture of comic book…
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Tribeca Film Festival Offerings
From a small festival in the wake of 9/11, the Tribeca Film Festival has blossomed over the past four years into one of New York City’s most anticipated cultural events. This year, there are an unusually abundant number of films with Jewish themes, from a consideration of female Israeli soldiers (“Close to Home”) to an…
The Latest
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From ‘Absurdistan’ by Gary Shteyngart
Project Overview The greatest danger facing American Jewry is our people’s eventual assimilation into the welcoming American fold and our subsequent extinction as an organized community. Due to the overabundance of presentable non-Jewish partners in a country as tantalizingly diverse and half-naked as America, it is becoming difficult if not impossible to convince young Jews…
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Six Degrees of Treyf: An Interview With Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, “Absurdistan,” comes out May 9, published by Random House. And since Shteyngart is one of only two novelists who have made me laugh out loud in the past year, it seemed time for an interview. We met in New York City at one of his favorite restaurants, the Grand Central Oyster…
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The Unclean Body
How interesting that the animal offered for sacrifice was required to be physically flawless, and that the Lord, looking into men’s hearts for a future king of Israel, elected the handsomest and tallest. Can man’s relation with the divine depend on the body‘s soundness and health? There are instances when un-health is used for punishment….
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Mad About Molly
Nearly 80 years ago, one of the most popular programs in the history of broadcasting debuted. “The Goldbergs,” a long-running series — first heard on the radio and later shown on television — about a Jewish matriarch and her family, offered some audiences their first introduction via airwaves to Jews, and others an opportunity to…
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Color Me Jewish: One Group’s Quest For Whiteness
The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity By Eric L. Goldstein Princeton University Press, 320 pages, $29.95. * * *| Last fall, researchers published a study claiming that higher IQ scores among Jews were a result of natural selection. This biological explanation for stereotypically Jewish traits was widely discredited by geneticists, but it…
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How Could I Feast?
Jewish law shows gentle consideration for mourners, but Moses, in Leviticus 10:16-20, seems to display no such compassion. There we encounter Moses acting as a sort of quality-assurance inspector at the newly inaugurated Mishkan (Tabernacle). He is checking on whether his priestly cousins, newly installed in their sacerdotal functions, have fully implemented the elaborate rules…
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Sowing the Seeds of Christianity
You don’t need to be a born-again Christian to understand the critical role played by the Holy Land in the development of Christianity. That’s probably what the folks at Cleveland’s new Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, which opened last October, are counting on by showing Cradle of Christianity, a major exhibition from the Israel Museum…
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‘Emil and Karl’
In 1940, famed writer Yankev Glatshteyn, best known to English readers as Jacob Glatstein, published “Emil and Karl,” a book about two friends, one Jewish and the other not, living in wartime Vienna. Intended for students at Yiddish afternoon and weekend schools, “Emil and Karl,” written in Yiddish, was one of the first books about…
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The Angel of Death Narrates a New Tale for Young Readers
The Book Thief By Markus Zusak Knopf Books for Young Readers, 552 pages, $16.95. * * *| Markus Zusak’s intensely provocative, deeply imagined and magnificently produced new novel, “The Book Thief,” concerns a group of German children who are members of the Hitler Youth during the early 1940s. We learn of their families, their tribulations,…
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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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