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
-
Disjointed Poetry
When Heidi Latsky was 11 years old, her mother suffered a meningioma, a brain tumor that led to her slow and ultimately fatal physical decline. For the next 35 years, the odyssey that Latsky, her family and her mother experienced until her death in 2004 elicited a maze of thoughts, memories and emotions. From May…
-
A Bohemian Poet Seen in Rare Spotlight
New and Selected Poems By Samuel Menashe, edited by Christopher Ricks Library of America, 191 pages, $20. * * *| Samuel Menashe might well be the most recognized unrecognized American poet of the past 40 years. Although his first book appeared in England in 1961, he was not able to find an American publisher for…
-
Putting Together the Pieces of a Sculptor’s Life and Work
Rebecca Spence For the first 10 years of artist Eva Hesse’s life, her father, Wilhelm, recorded in a series of painstakingly detailed diaries the everyday events that constituted her childhood. Interweaving photographs, text and newspaper clippings, his artfully collaged books — known in German as tägebucher — were intended to serve as a legacy for…
The Latest
-
The End of the World as We Know It
Lenny Bruce Is Dead By Jonathan Goldstein Counterpoint, 193 pages, $13. Lenny Bruce died in 1966 at the age of 40, from a morphine overdose in his home in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. Like Elvis would a little more than a decade later, Bruce died in the bathroom, which is both funny…
-
KGB Confidential: Unearthing a Hero of Soviet Jewry
There is a long-standing tradition among the Russian intelligentsia of honoring one’s intellectual heroes by prominently displaying their image for all to see. In a place where others might put family portraits, the Russian physicist has a photo of the professor who trained him; the poet stares up at Mandelstam or Brodsky. When I went…
-
Clothes Maketh the Man?
In a great metropolis, two gentlemen meet outside a large store that specializes in photographic and video equipment. They are both dressed soberly, one in the familiar navy-blue business suit, the other in a black caftan and a round cap with a thick fur brim and old-fashioned shoes, as well. Yehuda: Naftali! How are you?…
-
Video Artist Presents a Reinterpretation of Scripture
It takes some kind of chutzpah to announce at your wedding that you’re going to rewrite Deuteronomy because you find it offensive. But what kind of person turns such a wedding proclamation into an art exhibit? Melissa Shiff — a postmodern Canadian Jewish performance artist who was married by a secular humanist rabbi at a…
-
CONTRASTING LANDSCAPES
Known for his bold brushstrokes and vibrant colors, Michael Kovner creates paintings that offer lush images of Israeli scenery. An expansive beach dotted with red umbrellas, piles of yellow haystacks casting moody shadows in the sunlight and a blunt portrait of a lemon tree ripe with fruit are among his subjects. In Kovner’s new exhibition,…
-
Looking Back May 12, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Men, women, boys and girls appeared by the dozens at New York City’s Essex Street Police Station, carrying baskets of cats and kittens that they left in the waiting room. Little by little, the felines began to creep out of the baskets and walk around. The station’s sergeant, James…
-
Nice Jewish Boy Turns Bad, Gets Role
Sometimes the most creative acting gets done off-camera. Take Scott Cohen, whom big- and small-screen audiences will recognize from the television shows “Gilmore Girls” and “Law & Order: Trial by Jury,” the film “Kissing Jessica Stein” and, most famously, “The 10th Kingdom,” NBC’s seven-hour fantasy narrative in which he played the half-man, half-wolf lead. When…
-
A Witness To His Time
‘A filmmaker must be a witness of his times,” said great French director Jean-Pierre Melville, widely acknowledged as the grandfather of the French New Wave, in an interview about his 1969 movie, “Army of Shadows.” The film, a gloomy existentialist set piece of espionage that details the heroism of French partisans in the face of…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
- 2
Film & TV In ‘Disclosure Day,’ Steven Spielberg finds himself at odds with Jewish thought about aliens
- 3
Opinion Cultural boycotts of Israel just reached peak absurdity
- 4
Culture ‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Georgia’s Jewish senator called his newly minted GOP opponent an antisemite. Why?
-
Fast Forward Alex Bores’ supporters disagree on Israel. They agree on him.
-
Fast Forward Organizers of London Israeli real estate fair apologize after West Bank properties surface despite denials
-
Fast Forward Far-right YouTuber raises nearly $20K for Cornell student who said he was ‘not interested in working for a jew’