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
-
From ‘Portions’
Six years you may sow your field and six years may you prune your vineyard Pruning When we came in August, there were roses — budding, half opened, in bloom — and some we had missed in their glory. Their histories lost to us. The future is ours, and so I took up orange-handled shears,…
-
From ‘A Graft of Roses’
A synagogue. I had never before visited one, but knew from friends in Prague that the women sat separately, in the balcony. A portly rabbi with a formidable tri-colored beard and a whip-thin cantor stood on the altar, in front of a wooden ark heavily inlaid with metals and carvings. The foreign words of the…
-
A Drop in Distinction
‘How to Fall,” the third collection of tales by Edith Pearlman, winner of Sarabande Books’s Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, reads like the literary equivalent of a Broadway salute to established writers, ranging from American stars Cynthia Ozick and Nathan Englander to Israel’s lesser-known, but superb, Yehudit Hendel. To date, small presses have been…
The Latest
-
March 25, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • “Victory!!” screams the Forward’s front page. “Bravo, Hurrah, Cap Makers! Cheers to the entire Jewish quarter, which helped win this amazing battle! Hurrah to all the unions!” It’s a huge holiday for the Cap Makers, for all unions, for the Jewish quarter and for the entire American labor movement. At this…
-
Nailing Down a Film’s Legacy
Around this time last year, on the brink of Easter, the humble nail came into its own as a religious symbol. Tiny silver pendants in the shape of railroad spikes were among the many marketing tie-ins produced in connection with Mel Gibson’s cinematic phenomenon, “The Passion of the Christ.” Amid the dueling choruses of consternation…
-
The Shtetl Next Door
In my synagogue, the Jewish Center of Princeton, the lobby where mazel tovs drop like manna doubles as an art gallery. Often the art provides a demure backdrop for well-heeled congregants — a still life of lilacs here, a lithograph of the Old City over there. But not The Jewish Shtetl Today, an arresting exhibit…
-
The Central Message
Every year at this time in the annual cycle of readings, we are confronted with seemingly endless descriptions of cultic practices, often involving the slaughter of animals, that are for most of us at worst abhorrent and at best — the presentation of bread and cake to God — absurd. Let me try to put…
-
A Poet’s Contradictory Properties
For a while now, I have been asking Hasidic Jews, especially women, what they think poetry is supposed to be. In today’s Hasidic world, many view poetry as at worst secular, at best bittul torah, a frivolous distraction from serious learning. The women I’ve spoken to basically agree with this; they consider poetry ornamental or…
-
South Florida, Jewish Families and the Flight of Birds
Andrew Furman is best known for two smart, engaging books of criticism on Jewish-American fiction: “Israel Through the Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of Jewish-American Literature on Israel” and “Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma.” In an age when the paragraphs of far too many novice critics are bogged down by pretentiousness and heavy-water…
-
Forward Books
At the end of the classic John Ford Western, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” after Senator Ransom Stoddard (played by James Stewart) confesses that he is not the genuine hero people have made him out to be, a local newspaper editor gives this immortal reply: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes…
-
A Neighborhood in Flux, Again
It’s the summer of 1988, and a series of bubbles are about to burst. Michael Dukakis, riding high off a triumphant Democratic convention, holds a sizable lead over Vice President George Bush in the polls. The New York Mets, carried by twin superstars Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, are dominating the National League East, and…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
- 2
Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
- 3
Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point
- 4
Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion I run The Jewish Theological Seminary. Here’s the real story about President Isaac Herzog speaking at our commencement
-
Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point
-
News Why do some people think Mike Lawler is Jewish?
-
Art At the Venice Biennale, protests, self-mutilation and rage against Israel and Russia. Is anyone left to talk about the art?