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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Grasping at Branches in a Search for Mideast Peace
Imagine that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be settled by a misery contest. Each side would be able to pick its most tragic, catastrophic story to go up against the other, and the whole long history could be settled in one no-holds barred, mano a mano fight between two narratives. Who would the Israelis choose as…
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The Forgotten Heroine
According to news reports, New York is taking steps to honor the late Jane Jacobs, the heroine who saved the city from a Lower Manhattan Expressway. A street, as well as perhaps a playground, seems likely to be named for her, memorializing this iconic urban activist for generations to come. But Jacobs did not appear…
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The Maftir Chronicles
The complexities of married life, at least for my father, began the morning after the wedding — in, of all places, the synagogue. My father arrived early, several minutes before the service began, to look for the Shammes, the caretaker of the shul. “Shammes, I was married yesterday in the rabbi’s home, and I would…
The Latest
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A Star Historian Opens a New Chapter: Jewish Slaveowners
More than a decade ago, pioneering historian Natalie Zemon Davis was trudging through German archives, performing research for her book “Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives.” Published in 1995 and universally praised, the book was seen as vintage Davis: scholarly, but not impenetrable; groundbreaking, but not immoderate. Although she was researching the lives of…
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August 11
100 Years Ago in the Forward When actress Gella Web sang the song “Vilste Mikh Nit Kishn, Kishn, Kishn?” (“Don’t You Want To Kiss, Kiss, Kiss Me?”) in Wallach’s Yiddish Theatre last week to actor Frank Daniels, who then kissed her, the audience went wild and demanded an encore. In the second rendition, when Web…
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Abercrombie & Fitch Tries To Make Diversity Fashionable
Clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch is known for many things: classic casual apparel, fresh-faced half-naked models, and gorgeously photographed catalogs combining those two elements. But, for the past year, Abercrombie has been selling something that doesn’t have a price tag: tolerance. Last fall, Abercrombie teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League to create a diversity-training program…
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Today’s Lesson: The Birds and the Bees
‘A growing number of middle-school students are sexually active,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, in his speech at the organization’s biennial General Assembly conference in Houston last November. “The simple truth is this: Our kids are frustrated by the combined failure of their parents and their synagogues to…
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ZOA Brings Civil-rights Education to Campus
In an effort to publicize recent findings by a federal civil-rights commission that anti-Zionism on college campuses is tantamount to antisemitism, a pro-Israel advocacy group is launching a nationwide public-education campaign to inform Jewish students of their rights. This fall, the Zionist Organization of America will dispatch representatives to university campuses across America — from…
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Congregational Schools Focus on Teacher Training
Leaders in Jewish education agree that it’s time to focus more on the quality of congregational Hebrew schools — and a critical piece of that is teaching the teachers how to teach. Professional development, they say, must go beyond one-shot workshops and become an ongoing, on-site, in-depth exploration of technique, skill and Jewish content. Some…
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Touro College Reaches Beyond the Jewish World
This fall, Touro College will open a new campus in Miami Beach and a new school of social work on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Such expansion has recently become routine for the traditionally Jewish university; in the past five years alone, Touro opened new campuses in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Berlin. Founded…
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ORT’s Nonsectarian Work Booms
When ORT opened a computer-learning center in Brooklyn last year, the focus was on Orthodox Jewish students, but, within a few weeks, non-Jewish kids from the neighborhood were asking to take part. Now the Jews and non-Jews work next to each other every Tuesday and Thursday after school. The computer lab is a representative example…
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