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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An Old Warsaw Paper In the News Again
A chance meeting at Village Shalom in Kansas between volunteer teacher Bob Becker and Yadviga Finkelstein, a 93-year-old student, sparked the beginning of a monumental project. Finkelstein asked Becker if he could find volunteers to translate a Yiddish book written by her late husband, Chaim Finkelstein, and containing articles from a newspaper he edited in…
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August 18th, 2006
100 Years Ago Last Sunday, when two friends, Fanny Radinski and Bertha Singer, took a trip to Brooklyn’s Coney Island from the Brownsville area, only one of them came back alive. The one who did return, Singer, did so battered and bruised. The police eventually found Radinski’s body in the Coney Island Creek, under a…
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A Trieste Tragedy
*Voices From a Time By Silvia Bonucci, Translated by Martha King Steerforth Press, 180 pages, $12.95. Although there has been a Jewish presence on the Italian peninsula for more than 2,000 years, it would be inaccurate to speak of a single Jewish identity. The community of Rome is as distinct from that of Ferrara as…
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The Challenge of Defining Jewish Art
American Artists, Jewish Images By Matthew Baigell Syracuse University Press, 288 pages, $45. In 1966, art critic Harold Rosenberg gave a talk at The Jewish Museum in New York. “First, they build a Jewish museum; then they ask, ‘Is there a Jewish art?’ Jews!” he quipped. But Rosenberg went on to give his own response…
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After Delays, San Francisco Museum Finally Breaks Ground
God’s delays are not God’s denials.” So said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in his remarks at the ground-breaking of The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the phrase could not have been more appropriate. The museum has endured long waits and sizable setbacks to get to where it is today — opening with a Daniel Libeskind-designed…
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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…
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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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