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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Reconnoitering Translations
In the view of many biblical scholars, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, the fact-finding expedition narrated in Numbers 13-14 is a composite account from several sources. In the first, Caleb is among the scouts sent by Moses to the Promised Land, but only as far north as Hebron; Caleb alone remains loyal to God when his…
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Celebration Of The Arts
A 1925 silent movie about boxing, a pop-musical tragicomedy focused on obsessive behavior and a play that examines the life of a glamorous Hollywood actress may not seem like three things that have much in common, but they are all part of the National Yiddish Book Center’s second annual Paper Bridge Summer Arts Festival. The…
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June 23
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD As the city of Bialystok burns in a massive pogrom, its Jews have begun fighting back heroically. From the rooftops and from windows, Jews have begun to shoot back with rifles and handguns. As to who gave the call to attack the Jews, all fingers point to the government…
The Latest
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Love and Hate In Wartime Italy
The Water Door By Rosetta Loy Translated by Gregory Conti Other Press, 120 pages, $11.95. * * *| The 5-year-old narrator of Rosetta Loy’s brief, death-haunted novel “The Water Door” is, to borrow Henry James’s graceful phrase, a girl upon whom nothing is lost. To read this book is to become immersed in the intensity…
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What We Know, and Don’t, About Eichmann
Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, And Trial of a ‘Desk Murderer’ By David Cesarani Da Capo Press, 464 pages, $27.50. * * *| Most of what we know – or think we know – about Adolf Eichmann, a notorious Nazi functionary, may be wrong. Or so readers will surmise from “Becoming Eichmann,” David Cesarani’s…
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Klezmer in the East Looks to the West for Guidance
Midway through its hauntingly minimalist performance on the opening night of Moscow’s second-annual klezmer festival, the vocal quartet Ashkenazim took a dramatically long pause to introduce the song “Dem Shokhens Meydl.” The group’s tenor, Alina Ivakh, explained that song is an allegorical tale of two young pioneer girls — the Soviet version of Girl Scouts…
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Jewish Mobsters Amble From Text to the Panel
With 8 million stories in the Jewish naked city, artists Joe Kubert, Neil Kleid and Jake Allen have given us two riveting ones. With the growing interest in graphic novels and the pictorial evocation of historical events, it’s not surprising that more and more Jewish tales are ending up in panels instead of in type….
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June 16
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Hundreds of Jews were murdered in a vicious pogrom in Bialystok this week. The pogrom started after a bomb was thrown from a Jewish house at a Catholic procession. The government quickly spread the word that it was the work of Jewish anarchists and arranged for the hasty organization…
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This Magic Moment
Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era By Ken Emerson Viking Press, 320 pages, $25.95. * * *| Strange to say, there was a world before Clear Channel, Sirius and XM, before niche marketing and consolidation, before the hard-edged distinction between golden oldies (your parents’ music) and classic…
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Memorializing a Crime of Monumental Proportions
No one would say it’s an easy task to memorialize and document atrocity. Take the example of the Holocaust museum. The curator must find new ways of evoking the stench of death, the ruthless efficiency of the killing machine and the unfathomably high number of murdered families (at Auschwitz, those mountains of shoes and eyeglasses…
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Osirak, 25 Years Later
Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the Osirak bombing, when Israeli fighter planes bombed a French-built nuclear plant near Baghdad. The destruction of the near-completed reactor, which Israel believed was designed to make nuclear weapons to destroy Israel, was met with strong denunciation from the world community. A quarter-century later — with Iraq’s potential…
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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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Fast Forward Elected PA Jewish judge leaves Democratic party, citing ‘disturbingly common’ antisemitism
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Fast Forward At Abraham Foxman’s funeral, an elegy for the last generation with direct ties to the Holocaust
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Fast Forward Israeli report on ‘systematic’ Oct. 7 sexual violence seeks to shift debate from denial to accountability