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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Pilot Program Focuses on Teacher Retention
The largest North American organization for Jewish educators is taking on the greatest challenge facing Jewish schools: employing and retaining quality teachers. The Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education recently released its third semiannual progress report on Project Kavod, a three-year pilot project designed to improve the recruitment and retention of teachers working in…
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Asch’s Diamonds
Maybe it’s the fallacy that rewarding literature must be difficult that explains why no scholar has lingered in the literary universe of Polish-born American Yiddish novelist and playwright Sholem Asch (1880-1957). Asch, who published alongside Isaac Bashevis Singer and other luminaries in the Yiddish Forward, was considered a master of Yiddish fiction until a literary…
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Crossing Into the Director’s Chair
Like Leo Spivak, the character he plays in “King of the Corner,” Peter Riegert is on the road, selling his wares. But unlike the troubled Spivak, who is trapped in a job he increasingly dislikes — running focus groups for home-safety systems — as he undergoes a massive midlife crisis, Riegert is traveling across the…
The Latest
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A Fashion Icon Reveals Her Tough Side
“I’m pretty tough,” Diane von Furstenberg explained. No kidding. Sitting barefoot in her expansive office in Manhattan’s hip Far West Village, the princess-turned-socialite-turned-clothing-designer emits a cool vibe that is simultaneously glamorous, stern and relaxed. On a simmering summer afternoon, von Furstenberg looks flawless in white — showing no side effects from the sweltering heat —…
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A Theater Troupe Of One’s Own
A few years ago, a Jewish women’s theater group from Pittsburgh performed a short piece at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance’s fourth International Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy in New York. Called “Dancing With the Torah,” it was about a girl who is banned from the men’s side of the synagogue on the holiday of…
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Honoring My Cousin’s Courage
Sima Vaisman and my father, Lipa (Leon) Halfin, were first cousins. Their mothers were sisters and they lived in the same house in Kishinev, Bessarabia (now Moldova). Sima’s mother, Genia, was a widow. And my grandmother Sarah asked her husband, a well-to-do merchant, to welcome the mother and daughter to live with them. It was…
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Comfort, Comfort
This week’s portion, Va-Et’hanan, includes two of the most famous sections of the Bible, a second version of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5:6-18, and the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. One could write endlessly about these crucial texts and their importance for the history of Judaism. However, I’ll focus instead on the Haftarah, Isaiah 40:1-26,…
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August 19, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD In the wake of continuing unrest in Russia, and amid calls for democracy, Tsar Nikolai has begun to make noises about reforms. This is connected to a plan for wealthy Jews to provide huge loans to the Russian monarchy. Europe’s most important Jews are universally against such a plan…
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Looking Back August 12, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD This week, the Forward received a postcard from one Yidl Zaydman, in the shtetl of Rishkan in Bessarabia. It read as follows: “It’s not so good here, and even worse since the economy is so depressed. There has also been a riot of pogroms nearby, but always in other…
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Going Home Again
After a year of exhibits, lectures and articles to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the arrival of America’s first Jewish community, the themes from New York’s Center for Jewish History’s exhibit “Greetings From Home: 350 Years of American Jewish Life,” may feel familiar. The exhibit, a joint project of the American Jewish Historical Society in…
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Light Show; At the Israel Museum, Refreshing Looks at a Potentially Tired Cliche
From “Let there be Light” of biblical fame to modern sound-and-light shows, the notion of light as a metaphor or aesthetic tool is worn and tedious at best. Even as pietists, who claim dominion over Divine emanations, battle with the modernists who assert visual primacy, the serious metaphorical concept of light is clichéd and superficial….
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