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
-
Celebrating a Composer Who Celebrates Multiple Cultures
Composer Osvaldo Golijov is being celebrated at New York City’s Lincoln Center with a month-long series of performances of his works, titled The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov. Musical America named Golijov composer of the year. His latest release, “Ayre” — based on traditional songs and poems in Ladino, Arabic and Hebrew — evokes the period…
-
A Babel Biographer Chases His Moving Target
Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel By Jerome Charyn Random House, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Isaac Babel was an iconoclast whose small, mysterious oeuvre, delivered in a deft, compact Russian shaped at a time of revolution, becomes more alluring with the passage of time. As Jerome Charyn puts it in…
-
Minors in Jewish Studies Make Major Gains
That explains how minor programs became possible, but there’s still the question of motivation: Why would a Catholic school set up a Jewish studies program? “It is part of the aspiration of Catholic colleges to be great colleges,” Fisher told the Forward. “Excellent colleges have Jewish studies; you can’t teach Western civilization without it.” The…
The Latest
-
Not Your Mother’s Neil Diamond
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A hip and really hot music producer seeks out an old and established artist — perhaps a bit past his prime — and talks him into working on an album. The point of the collaboration is to emphasize the singer’s craft and the song itself, and so…
-
Orthodox Rethinking Campus Outreach
Following on the heels of Chabad-Lubavitch’s successful campus programs, other Orthodox groups are now reaching out in new ways to college students of every Jewish denomination. Non-Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox Jews — or mitnagdim — have adopted an approach that is startlingly similar to the one presented by Chabad, the Hasidic sect whose outreach efforts have made…
-
America Gets a New Tocqueville
Following in the footsteps of his countryman, famed French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy — or BHL, as he is widely known — will release “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,” the result of a yearlong journey through America. Though Lévy is careful not to compare himself with Tocqueville — the 19th-century French aristocrat…
-
Deli Maker Finds Delicious Way To Raise Funds
The heads of Abeles & Heymann Gourmet Kosher Provisions are thinking about hot dogs in a whole new way. Concerned about the rising costs of education at Jewish day schools, A&H co-presidents Seth Leavitt and David Flamholz have decided to take action. They recently launched A&H for ABCs, a yearlong initiative in which a percentage…
-
January 20, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD In New York, Sam Abelman’s First Street Saloon became the scene of a wild brawl after Abelman and his barkeep demanded payment of 10 cents from a group of about a dozen men who were playing billiards there. Abelman’s request for the dime was met with a barrage of…
-
Protecting Jewish Health
A new exhibit at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York highlights the history of a little-known organization called Society for the Protection of Jewish Health. Assistant Curator Jesse Aaron Cohen offers a preview of “Fighting for a Healthy New Generation,” which was curated by Krysia Fisher. In 1912, the Obshchestwo Zdravookhraneniya Yevreyev…
-
Day School in N.Y. ‘Adopts’ Gaza’s Displaced Students
It started as a simple letter-writing campaign: The students at an Orthodox boys’ school in Monsey, N.Y., sent notes expressing their sympathy to kids their age who were forced to move last summer when Israel evacuated settlements in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. But then the project grew, and soon Yeshiva Darchei Noam…
-
‘Intelligent Design’ Battles Rage On
Advocates of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools suffered a major loss last month, when a judge in Dover, Pa., struck down a proposed curriculum based on the concept. But this was not the last word on the subject. In fact, battles over Intelligent Design continue to rage, with fronts spreading across America. Parents in…
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 Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
-
Fast Forward Former antisemitic activist Lucas Gage explains to Jewish podcast why he left the movement
-
Sports This year’s biggest World Cup upset came from its most Jew-ish team
-
Fast Forward JD Vance: Israeli Cabinet shouldn’t be criticizing ‘only powerful ally’ left in the world