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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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
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Rashanim Offers a Series of Surprises
Nothing ages faster than the avant-garde. In music, in dance and in the visual arts, yesterday’s innovation quickly becomes today’s commonplace — all of which makes saxophonist and composer John Zorn’s achievements in Jewish music all the more remarkable. Zorn began his explorations of radical Jewish culture in the early 1990s. By mid-decade, he had…
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Merry Wonderer of the Night
Marla’s Catholic husband, Billy, sometimes reads the Torah to understand her values. And now, just as they’re slipping into bed, he mentions this week’s portion, Ki Tavo. “It just sounds so… so Christian,” he says. “I figured the Jewish version would be different from what I was taught, but it’s the same: If the Hebrews…
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Women Trailblazers Honored
“I am convinced that there is a place in hell for women who do not help each other,” honoree Madeleine Korbel Albright said at the September 7 Women Who Changed the Landscape for Women dinner. The event was held at The Waldorf-Astoria and was sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Women. “When I…
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September 23, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Officer Miller saw that a small crowd had gathered in Manhattan at the corner of Second Avenue and 2nd Street, despite orders by New York City’s chief of police that such gatherings not be permitted — particularly in bad neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. He told the group…
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Looking Back September 16, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD “The problem is that the bride is too pretty,” begins an editorial describing the English-language American press’s complaints about Jewish immigrants. Although some of the papers take on an allegedly friendly tone toward the Jews, they complain about how they excel in many aspects of life, from business to…
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Illuminating the Big Screen
Okay, class, here’s a question: You’re watching a movie that stars Elijah Wood, and one of the characters in the film says to him, “The ring is not here because of us. We are here because of the ring.” What movie is it? If you answered “The Lord of the Rings,” two demerits; turns out…
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What Melting Pot?
Name a Woody Allen movie that has a leading black actor in its cast. Now, mention a “Seinfeld” episode in which Elaine, Jerry, George and Kramer socialize in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with some Korean friends. How about a story with Cuban Americans, written by Isaac Bashevis Singer? Movies, television and literature…
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An Author’s Story, Fleshed Out in Flesh
My Body in Nine Parts By Raymond Federman Starcherone Books, 136 pages, $16. * * *| The marketing departments that run America’s publishing houses now dictate to most the definition of literature. Even in the Jewish community, one of the last remaining “focus groups” of avid readers, we have let significant writers slip through the…
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Imagining Life as A Black Woman –– In the Bible
In a recent meeting with the Forward at the Hotel Plaza Athenee on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side, French novelist Marek Halter sketched one stone tablet, then its twin. He fashioned an ark around them and announced, “The Ten Commandments came from Moses.” He paused, popped a wasabi pea in his mouth and set his…
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In Praise of Dissembling
Deuteronomy 22:1-3 contains the admirable commandment to return your neighbor’s lost property. At the end of 22:3 we have the following isolated clause, preceded by a colon in the King James and by a semicolon in the Jewish Publication Society 1917 translations: thou mayest not hide thyself Everett Fox concurs, offering, after a colon, “you…
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Wilder Times: A Life and Legacy
‘A brain full of razor blades and a heart full of chutzpah.” That’s how filmmaker Billy Wilder described “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich, the opportunistic lawyer in “The Fortune Cookie” (1966). But those same words could well be used to describe Wilder himself. Wilder, the great American filmmaker who died in 2002, is best remembered for the…
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