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
-
Taking Care of Husbands
A husband suspects his wife of adultery, a capital crime. He takes her before the priest, who makes her drink a witches’ brew of holy water and dust from the tabernacle floor. She makes a solemn declaration: If she is innocent, the bitter water will have no effect, but if guilty, she will experience acute…
-
Looking Back June 2, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD It’s a known fact that many young sweatshop workers are terribly jealous of Singer sewing machine agents, who make good money, are well dressed and perform work that doesn’t seem very strenuous. But the reality is that they are enslaved to the company. Though it seems like they’re partners,…
-
Searching for Answers, After the Fire
Triangle By Katharine Weber Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $23. * * *| ‘Triangle” is a prose cousin of certain one-act plays, those taut dramatic exercises in which just a few characters, engaging in conversation, conjure grand notions. (Think of “No Exit,” “Waiting for Godot,” “Doubt.”) At its best, Katharine Weber’s new novel has…
The Latest
-
A Very Special Episode: ‘Everwood’ Series Finale Has the Rite Stuff
The fictional television town of Everwood, Colo., has no synagogue and no rabbi, not even a fictional one. Its leading citizen is played by the palpably WASPy Treat Williams, and its network — The WB — gave birth to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Beauty and the Geek.” So it might be the last place,…
-
Good Guys and Bad Guys
Who are the good guys? That’s what every well-meaning European, left-wing European, intellectual European, liberal European always wants to know, first and foremost. Who are the good guys in the film and who are the bad guys. In this respect Vietnam was easy: The Vietnamese people were the victims, and the Americans were the bad…
-
The Enduring Power of ‘Education’
My 13-year-old son, Menachem, is my valued chavruta, or study partner; he has a keen and creative mind, and I hope he will one day become a true talmid chochom, or religious scholar. We study Talmud together every evening and Sabbath; Menachem’s mornings at yeshiva are also filled with the study of religious texts. But…
-
Returning to Bethlehem
THE BOOK OF RUTH IS READ ON SHAVUOT ‘We should never have left Bethlehem,” the older woman was saying. “It was bad enough when Elimelech died; what a shock to my system. I blame him for what happened to my boys. Not to mention, there was this parcel of land….” “Your boys…,” Ruth thought sadly….
-
Festival Of Arts New York
It’s that time of year again. After six months of pondering, exploring and expressing the theme of “wandering,” the 27 members of Makor’s Artists-in-Residence program have created works that will be presented in the seventh Biannual Makor Marathon. As the event is a multimedia, multidisciplinary festival of visual and performing arts, its theme seems appropriate:…
-
An American Look
Styles, themes and subjects of American art created in the first half of the 20th century are examined in a traveling exhibition, My America: Art From the Jewish Museum Collection, 1900-1955. Originally organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, the show makes its way to the Bay Area, where it will be presented at the…
-
Amid the Smokestacks, An American Dream
Now You See It… Stories from Cokesville, PA By Bathsheba Monk Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $22. * * *| Cokesville, Pa., is a gritty fictional American shtetl. It is populated by Polish-Catholic émigrés and anchored by the steel mills in which they are employed. It is a place both defined and defeated by…
-
Rivalry In the Time Of Cholera
An Imperfect Lens By Anne Roiphe Shaye Areheart Books, 304 pages, $25. * * *| Disease, horrifying as it can be in real life, usually makes for a good read — gripping, intense, fearful and always entertaining. Veteran novelist Anne Roiphe’s latest book, “An Imperfect Lens,” is a riveting work of historical fiction, taking the…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Culture In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026
- 2
Exclusive Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure you
- 3
News Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
- 4
Culture 70 years ago, this Jewish choreographer predicted our epidemic of loneliness and isolation
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward In rallies taking on Israel, a defiant Hasan Piker boosts Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed
-
Opinion The Iran war looks like a failure. Now comes the Trump-Netanyahu spin game
-
Fast Forward US and Iran agree to ‘fragile’ 2-week ceasefire; Israel says deal does not extend to Lebanon
-
Music An 82-year-old Jewish recording legend on his film directing debut: ‘I could have been good at this’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
