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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Looking Back May 5, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD New York City’s Lower East Side has been flooded with fliers that denounce the Forward. “We Galician Jews hereby protest the Forward for the insult they printed, saying that Galitzianers are shnorrers.” The flier, which is signed by “The Committee,” demands an apology. We would like to ask just…
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Etgar Keret’s Unlikely Landscape
The Nimrod Flip-out By Etgar Keret Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 176 pages, $12. * * *| Etgar Keret’s fame in Israel is as unlikely as one of his own stories: A young writer of ultrashort, ultramodern fictions produces four straight best-selling collections. The stories in his collections go on to be translated into 16 languages…
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Looking Back April 28, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD “Freedom is the Jews’ messiah,” said Russian writer Maksim Gorky, who is currently in New York. In a speech at the Grand Palais coliseum, Gorky described the importance of the Jews to the Russian revolutionary movement and how the Russian government has fomented antisemitism. He said that it was…
The Latest
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Donald Fagen Completes His Trilogy
A ghostly presence with unknown intent has descended. The new album “Morph the Cat” isn’t so much a feline as a feeling — and a happy one at that, as the title song says, “bringing joy to New York City, Christmas without the chintzy stuff.” But don’t be fooled. With his musical partner of nearly…
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Stereotype This! Introducing Ethnic Superheroes
Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob. Eventually, Noah begat Shem and, in due course, nerdy Jewish kids begat superheroes. In 1933, two nebbishes named Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel created Superman (birth name “Kal-El,” Hebrew for “All God”), and since then it’s been a source of pride that Jews created the culture of comic book…
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Tribeca Film Festival Offerings
From a small festival in the wake of 9/11, the Tribeca Film Festival has blossomed over the past four years into one of New York City’s most anticipated cultural events. This year, there are an unusually abundant number of films with Jewish themes, from a consideration of female Israeli soldiers (“Close to Home”) to an…
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From ‘Absurdistan’ by Gary Shteyngart
Project Overview The greatest danger facing American Jewry is our people’s eventual assimilation into the welcoming American fold and our subsequent extinction as an organized community. Due to the overabundance of presentable non-Jewish partners in a country as tantalizingly diverse and half-naked as America, it is becoming difficult if not impossible to convince young Jews…
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Six Degrees of Treyf: An Interview With Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, “Absurdistan,” comes out May 9, published by Random House. And since Shteyngart is one of only two novelists who have made me laugh out loud in the past year, it seemed time for an interview. We met in New York City at one of his favorite restaurants, the Grand Central Oyster…
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The Unclean Body
How interesting that the animal offered for sacrifice was required to be physically flawless, and that the Lord, looking into men’s hearts for a future king of Israel, elected the handsomest and tallest. Can man’s relation with the divine depend on the body‘s soundness and health? There are instances when un-health is used for punishment….
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Sowing the Seeds of Christianity
You don’t need to be a born-again Christian to understand the critical role played by the Holy Land in the development of Christianity. That’s probably what the folks at Cleveland’s new Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, which opened last October, are counting on by showing Cradle of Christianity, a major exhibition from the Israel Museum…
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‘Emil and Karl’
In 1940, famed writer Yankev Glatshteyn, best known to English readers as Jacob Glatstein, published “Emil and Karl,” a book about two friends, one Jewish and the other not, living in wartime Vienna. Intended for students at Yiddish afternoon and weekend schools, “Emil and Karl,” written in Yiddish, was one of the first books about…
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