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
-
The Logic of Impurity
The ritual of the Red Heifer is one of the most mysterious rituals in the entire Torah. (I have no doubt that this first sentence has been written many times before, but the ritual is so mysterious — so contrary to “logic” — that it is virtually impossible to write about it without commenting on…
-
Art Sailor, Expert In Knots, Ties the Matrimonial One
The June 19 wedding of Sarah Hoenig, 21, and Eric Kinzbrunner, 22, began with all the pageantry one would expect of an Orthodox ceremony. In a pre-wedding bedeken, the bride’s veil was lowered. The marriage contract, or ketubah, was signed at the groom’s table, or tisch, and the blessings were chanted and the glass broken…
-
‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’ By Irina Reyn
Each month, in coordination with our reading series in New York, the Forward publishes an excerpt from the work of that month’s series guest or guests. This month, we will feature readings by writers from the former Communist bloc, Ewa Zadrzynska-Glowacki and Irina Reyn (for full details, please see sidebar), and the excerpt we have…
The Latest
-
Divide and Concur
Although the portion is called simply Korah, the assault on Moses’ leadership was led by a coalition of opponents with different gripes and different goals. The portion begins with a list of the leaders: “Korah son of Yitzhar son of Kehat son of Levi, and Datan and Aviram sons of Eliav and On son of…
-
July 1, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • After hearing reports of families living in terrible poverty, we sent a reporter to visit some of them. One family, the Grossmans, comprises a widow and her three children. They live on the fourth floor of a tenement on Manhattan’s Chrystie Street. Mrs. Grossman, whose late husband worked in a tin…
-
Tracing the Legacy of German Jews in America
Who were the German Jews who came to America, and what have they become? Starting Over: The Experience of German Jews in America, 1830-1945, the recently opened exhibition at the Leo Baeck Institute, gives visitors a chance to meditate on these questions as well as to revisit some familiar and not so familiar faces and…
-
Male and Female Created He Them
Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex By Shmuley Boteach Regan Books, 326 pages, $24.95. * * *| Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles By Otto Weininger, translated from German by Ladislaus Löb and edited by Daniel Steuer with Laura Marcus Indiana University Press, 440 pages, $75. * * *| ‘The…
-
This Month at Novel Jews
Ewa Zadrzynska-Glowacki is a writer, journalist and cultural consultant originally from Warsaw. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times and in New York Newsday, and in Poland by Polityka, Gazeta Wyborcza and Twoj Styl. Irina Reyn is a writer and book reviewer whose reviews have appeared in such publications as the San…
-
June 17, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • The bosses of the jacket-making sweatshop at 40 Cherry Street in Manhattan are having a difficult time dealing with their striking workers. Their hired goons and foremen have attacked the pickets and have brought in the police to arrest them. Those strikers who were arrested had their bail paid by the…
-
A Century of Israeli Art, on View in Berlin
Pogroms in Russia before and during the First World War sent waves of Jewish emigrants fleeing to Palestine. Around the same time, Jewish painters from across Europe settled in Tel Aviv, where an arts scene flourished in the 1920s, planting the seeds of Jewish national identity. It is this compelling chapter that opens “The New…
-
Holding Patterns
When sleep eludes me, I conjugate Spanish verbs. I begin with nice, regular verbs in the indicative mood. Hablar, comer, vivir: to speak, to eat, to live. I move methodically through the present tense, the preterit past, the past imperfect, the future and the conditional. Then on to forms requiring auxiliary verbs — the perfect,…
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
News Abdul El-Sayed is courting Jewish voters — without moderating his views on Israel
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Mamdani calls AIPAC ‘monsters’ in rally ahead of NY primaries
-
Fast Forward Jewish groups push back against Trump’s Iran deal — but more quietly so far than in 2015
-
News Who is Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli politician who could dethrone Netanyahu?
-
Culture My father was my hero and, when he was dying, I wrote this song for him