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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The Strange Journey Taken by Two Paintings
In 2002, an unusual advertisement in this newspaper caught subscriber Jack Nusan Porter’s eye: Two mysterious paintings, rendered by an unknown artist “at least 210 years” ago, were for sale. The paintings — which, as Porter later learned, were owned by a Ukrainian Jew named Alexander Goykham — had survived two centuries of anti-Jewish persecution,…
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Fiction About Israel
Two weeks ago, we asked readers to help us create a list of the best novels and short stories about Israel written by diaspora authors. The purpose was to push fiction as a complement to the newspaper, the television and the Internet in our quest for information and understanding about Israel. Below, your suggestions, along…
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Mozart’s Librettist Gets the Stage
An even better Mozart-motivated movie than “Amadeus” has yet to be made. The subject: Wolfgang’s magnificent collaborator, Lorenzo Da Ponte, the libertine librettist of “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così fan tutte” — arguably Mozart’s greatest works, and watersheds in the history of music and theater, not to mention humanity. The episodic cinematic…
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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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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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