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
-
A Call to Liberals To Take Back the Light
‘The separation of Church and State does not mean the segregation of religion from the public discourse,” Evangelical Christian Minister Jim Wallis said in a recent interview with the Forward. Wallis –– who lives in Washington, D.C., with his sons and wife, the Rev. Joy Carroll (the first woman to be ordained in the Church…
-
The Transformative Tale of ‘GI Jews’
GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation By Deborah Dash Moore Harvard University Press, 368 pages, $25.95. * * *| Contemporary Jewish thought has been shaped by the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel and the transformation of the American Jewish community from a distant, peripheral outpost into the hub of…
-
Torah Couture
Walking around the classroom, Rabbi Katz returns the weekly homework assignments, stops at Shira’s desk. “Shira, you know our assignments are to summarize each Torah portion, but you copied every single word.” “Details are important,” she says, looking at her returned homework. “A ‘C’? You’re giving me a ‘C’?” Rabbi Katz reminds himself to be…
The Latest
-
February 11, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • A telegram arrived this week from members of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia describing events over there. Part of it read, “At the behest of the Bund’s Central Committee, massive strikes have broken out in all regions where the Bund is active: in Vilna, Bialystok, Kovno, Dvinsk, Pinsk, Mohilev, Berditshev,…
-
The Cold War’s Strangest Bedfellows How Romania Sold Its Jews to Israel, and What It Got in Return
The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of The Extraordinary Secret Bargain Between Romania and Israel By Radu Ioanid Ivan R. Dee, 254 pages, $26. * * *| Surely the Cold War never produced stranger bedfellows than Shaike Dan and General Ghe- orghe Marcu. Dan, a Jew from Bessarabia, parachuted into Romania at the close…
-
Papa Was a Rolling Stone How One Young Woman Pieced Together Her Father’s Story
Assembling My Father By Anna Cypra Oliver Houghton Mifflin, 368 pages, $25. * * *| The old chestnut about 1960s hedonism ran that if you remembered the decade, you weren’t really there. If the joke once reflected a popular perception of the times, it also missed a much more unpleasant truth. Released from social conventions,…
-
For Women, Middle Ages Might Have Been Golden
Eight hundred years ago, thousands of Jewish Egyptian women refused to immerse in the ritual bath. Only Maimonides’s threat that they would lose their Ketubah money quelled the orchestrated rebellion, years after it began. A century later in Ashkenaz (Christian Europe), rabbis were astonished by the large number of Jewish women who refused to have…
-
An Israeli Photographer Finds Holiness at the Rave
In a whirl of light and color, Tomer Ganihar believes he has photographed holiness. And for this Israeli photographer, it lives at the rave. “In the clubs, holiness is everywhere.” Ganihar said. “It’s like a temple. The clubs are the new synagogues, and the DJs are the rabbis.” Using long exposures and only a simple…
-
Dwelling Among Them
After the action-packed stories of the first one-and-a-half books of the Torah — all of Genesis and the first part of Exodus — the main narrative abruptly changes course in the middle of the book of Exodus. Stories such as the creation of the world, the flood, the lives of the patriarchs, the slavery in…
-
From The Angel of Forgetfulness by Steve Stern
Last summer, the Forward dipped its toes into the world of fiction by co-sponsoring a monthly literary series in New York called “Novel Jews.” The series has become an enormous success, with one drawback: It is not available to the majority of our readers, who live outside New York. In an effort to include them,…
-
Plaut Redux: Reforming the Reform Commentary
Since its release nearly a quarter-century ago, the Reform movement’s first biblical commentary has sold 250,000 copies and helped fuel a revolution in Torah study. But, as more and more congregations in recent years began placing a greater emphasis on Hebrew and Torah reading during Sabbath services, the tome essentially fell out of step with…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Exclusive Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure you
- 2
Culture 70 years ago, this Jewish choreographer predicted our epidemic of loneliness and isolation
- 3
Opinion Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews
- 4
Culture The original anti-Zionists have been all but forgotten. Molly Crabapple wants to change that.
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Dan Bilzerian wants to ‘kill Israelis’ and thinks Judaism is ‘terrible.’ Now he’s running for Congress.
-
Fast Forward After AIPAC-backed primary loss, Tom Malinowski endorses rival who says Israel committed genocide
-
Opinion Viktor Orbán may fall. Netanyahu should be next
-
Opinion Hungary is poised to topple an authoritarian leader. American Jews have something to learn
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
