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 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…
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A Mosaic of Jewish Music in America
The old Woody Allen joke about a book of great Jewish athletes — it’s more of a pamphlet, really — wouldn’t work with great Jewish composers. So when pianists Joel Sachs and Cheryl Seltzer, co-directors of the new music ensemble CONTINUUM, decided to present a program of works by modern American Jewish composers last month…
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Shelumiel — The First Schlemiel?
In the German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem, a leafy residential lane bears the name Yitzhak Crémieux Street. If that name sounds only half-familiar, perhaps the name Adolphe Crémieux rings a louder bell? A prominent Jewish political figure in 19th-century France, Crémieux combined a long career in elective office with service to the Jewish community, including…
The Latest
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Looking Back May 26, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD New York City’s East Side Pushcart Peddlers Association held meetings this week to protest the unjust way in which Jewish pushcart peddlers are being treated. They say that Jewish peddlers who request licenses are frequently turned away, whereas Christian peddlers get their licenses without a fuss. In addition, there…
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In Defense of the (High) Art of Writing
The Din in the Head By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $24. * * *| It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that any person in possession of a large personal library will covet, if he or she does not already own, essays written by Cynthia Ozick. Why? Because Ozick’s paragraphs contain equal measures…
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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…
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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…
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Haunted by the Ghosts of Traumas Past
Blue Nude By Elizabeth Rosner Ballantine Books, 224 pages, $22.95. * * *| ‘In retrospect, I can see that I spent much of my childhood waiting for the war,” Eva Hoffman wrote in “After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins” (PublicAffairs, 2004), her renowned investigation of the trauma of second-generation…
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Shattering a Peaceful Facade
The Attack By Yasmina Khadra Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 272 pages, $18.95. * * *| The comparisons are inevitable, so let’s get the ball rolling: Yasmina Khadra’s new novel, “The Attack,” is a successor of sorts to the 2005 art house hit, “Paradise Now.” Like Hany Abu-Assad’s mournful, despairing film, “The Attack” is an iconoclastic Muslim…
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Beyond ‘Fear’: Tips on Chutzpah
Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life By Erica Jong Tarcher, 304 pages, $22.95. * * *| At the end of “Fear of Flying,” Erica Jong’s 1973 best-selling novel, the lead character lists potential female heroes. Simone de Beauvior? Too obsessed with Sartre. Sylvia Plath? Stuck her head in an oven. Doris Lessing? Her female…
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Our Own Superhero: A Matter of Pryde
Bar mitzvah boys can be divided, if you crunch the dataset right, into two groups: those who wished over their bar mitzvah cakes for superpowers, and those who wished to meet their favorite girl with superpowers: Kitty Pryde. Granted this might be limited to the subset of bar mitzvah boys who know what a dataset…
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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