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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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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Looking Back April 21, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Thousands of people are dead or wounded after an earthquake destroyed the city of San Francisco. Most of the city’s buildings collapsed and are now in flames. Smaller buildings were mostly made of wood and also have gone up in flames. The fires cannot be extinguished because the city’s…
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Folk or Not, Sephardic Music for the Ages
Just because something’s common doesn’t mean it’s easy. Classical composers, for example, have long mined folk music for inspiration: Brahms had a thing for German folk tunes, Chopin made the Polish mazurka a mainstay of Romantic piano literature and Bartok built much of his music atop a foundation of Magyar folk song. But turning folk…
The Latest
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Mad About Molly
Nearly 80 years ago, one of the most popular programs in the history of broadcasting debuted. “The Goldbergs,” a long-running series — first heard on the radio and later shown on television — about a Jewish matriarch and her family, offered some audiences their first introduction via airwaves to Jews, and others an opportunity to…
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Color Me Jewish: One Group’s Quest For Whiteness
The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity By Eric L. Goldstein Princeton University Press, 320 pages, $29.95. * * *| Last fall, researchers published a study claiming that higher IQ scores among Jews were a result of natural selection. This biological explanation for stereotypically Jewish traits was widely discredited by geneticists, but it…
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How Could I Feast?
Jewish law shows gentle consideration for mourners, but Moses, in Leviticus 10:16-20, seems to display no such compassion. There we encounter Moses acting as a sort of quality-assurance inspector at the newly inaugurated Mishkan (Tabernacle). He is checking on whether his priestly cousins, newly installed in their sacerdotal functions, have fully implemented the elaborate rules…
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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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The Angel of Death Narrates a New Tale for Young Readers
The Book Thief By Markus Zusak Knopf Books for Young Readers, 552 pages, $16.95. * * *| Markus Zusak’s intensely provocative, deeply imagined and magnificently produced new novel, “The Book Thief,” concerns a group of German children who are members of the Hitler Youth during the early 1940s. We learn of their families, their tribulations,…
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Trauma and Its Healers
Mapping Trauma and Its Wake: Autobiographic Essays By Pioneer Trauma Scholars Edited by Charles R. Figley Routledge, 272 pages, $49.95. * * *| A medical text in the “Psychosocial Stress Series” of an academic publisher would usually not interest general readers. But with aftereffects of terrorism and disaster an ongoing concern and reports surfacing of…
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Musical Tributes to Tragedy’s Victims
Music by those who perished in the Holocaust has lately enjoyed something of a vogue, with both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences discovering the work, and unfilled promise, of composers like Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, Pavel Haas and Hans Krása. But what of the music written in the aftermath the Holocaust to honor the dead? Such…
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