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
-
The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
-
Exploring What Binds –– and Divides –– Jews and Christians
Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History By David Klinghoffer Doubleday, 256 pages, $24.95 — The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament’s Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book By Julie Galambush HarperSanFrancisco, 352 pages, $24.95. — In the past few years, there has been a growing interest in the New Testament…
-
The Roman Era, Revised
In many Jewish imaginations, the Roman period — from the conquest of Judea in 64 BCE to roughly the sixth century C.E. — is remembered as a time of tragedy and catastrophe. The early years of the Common Era witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple and the devastation of the Jewish populace in Israel…
The Latest
-
My Tower of Babel
I spent every holiday — American, Jewish and otherwise — with my mother’s Cuban family. At Rosh Hashanah and Passover we crammed into my Aunt Rachel’s five-room flat, which was decorated with ashtrays from various restaurants and hotels to which she had never been. Seated at the holiday table we were in a collapsed Tower…
-
Mourning with Freud
Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk By Matthew von Unwerth Riverhead, 256 pages, $23.95. * * *| ‘Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk” by Matthew von Unwerth is a meditation, a fugue — conceivably a psychoanalytic novella –– that has at its nexus…
-
Airing the Family’s (Blood-stained) Laundry
Blood Relation By Eric Konigsberg HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25.95. * * *| As a teenager at a boarding school, journalist Eric Konigsberg came across a groundskeeper who once had worked the mob beat as a New York cop. The man asked Eric if he was related to infamous mob hitman Harold Konigsberg. Thanks to his…
-
Fragments of a Lost Jewish World
Young Turk By Moris Farhi Arcade Publishing, 392 pages, $25. * * *| Toward the end of Moris Farhi’s elegiac, ambitious novel, a professor of literature who is the voice of Turkish conscience in the book tells a budding Turkish Jewish writer: “One thing, young Turk: Don’t lose the young Jew. Cherish everybody’s difference. If…
-
A Family Snapshot, in Black and White
Off-White: A Memoir By Laurie Gunst Soho Press, 288 pages, $25. * * *| Rhoda Cobin Lloyd died in October 1986. Her funeral was a small, open-casket affair that ended with a eulogy by Laurie Gunst, Southern Jew and historian. The eulogy was short: All Gunst could say was that Lloyd’s parents, Sam and Julie,…
-
FLASH FRAMES
Vladimir Jabotinsky may be best known as the father of Revisionist Zionism and as the author of the essay “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs,” but he also was a novelist who is known for his Zionist re-fashioning of the biblical hero Samson. Written in Russian, “The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in…
-
The First Family
After the Parent gave birth to them, He settled down contentedly to watch their innocent gambols in the Garden. He’d warned His young Adam and Eve against the usual hazards of childhood, like running out into the street, avoiding snakes, not touching dangerous objects, and in their trance of innocence they’d nodded agreement to the…
-
October 28, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Word has come from Russia that the tsar finally has conceded to the demands of the people and that a real constitution will be issued, ultimately freeing that country from dictatorial servitude. At last the Russian labor movement has succeeded in forcing the tsar to give up his power…
-
Retracing a Living Legend’s First Steps
Philip Roth: Novels and Stories, 1959-1962 Library of America, 913 pages, $35. Philip Roth: Novels, 1967-1972 Library of America, 672 pages, $35. * * *| One interesting way to pass the time is to spend an hour rereading old reviews of Philip Roth’s books. You read them and quickly discover that for as long as…
Explore
Most Popular
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Anti-Israel rhetoric is fueling an alarmingly powerful new wave of antisemitism on the right
-
Fast Forward Joe Rogan defends Ye’s ‘Heil Hitler’ song
-
Fast Forward NYU withholds diploma of student who condemned ‘genocide’ and ‘atrocities currently happening in Palestine’ in graduation speech
-
Fast Forward Jewish activist Shabbos Kestenbaum settles antisemitism lawsuit with Harvard
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
