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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Resurrecting Modigliani’s Bar Mitzvah
‘I went through graduate school never hearing his name,” recalled Mason Klein, the curator of “Modigliani: Beyond the Myth,” a show of some 100 works by the original peintre maudit, which opened at New York’s Jewish Museum. The installation of the city’s first major Modigliani exhibition in more than 50 years was in full swing…
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Following Another Through Grief
At several points in the novel “A Song I Knew by Heart,” author Bret Lott refers to a character straining under the sheer effort of putting a feeling into a few words — “the work of it,” he writes. The story, which is a modern retelling of the biblical Ruth and Naomi narrative, might as…
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The Cheese Factor
If you are anything like me, then come late springtime, when Shavuot rolls around, your mind turns to thoughts of cheesecake. (Of course, if you’re really like me, then you’re thinking about cheesecake, on and off, pretty much all year long.) This is an extremely pleasant line of thought, but it is hardly a novel…
The Latest
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Scandals Waking Investors to Corporate Responsibility
The Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation has held shares in ExxonMobil through its various money funds for years. But this month’s shareholder meeting will mark the first time that the foundation will send a proxy to vote on resolutions facing the company —including ones on global warming and the salaries of Exxon executives. It is…
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May 14, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • As a result of the massive rent strike currently in effect on the Lower East Side, a group of local landlords held a meeting during which they discussed tactics such as to how to raise rents. Considering the success of the current rent strike, which is growing every day, the possibility…
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From Seeing Red to Writing Blind
Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey By David Horowitz, edited with an introduction by Jamie Glazov Spence Publishing Company, 497 pages, $29.95. * * *| Be advised, dear reader, this is no ordinary book review. How could it be? On p.xxxiv of the book’s introduction, entitled “The Life and Work of David Horowitz,” you can read…
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Secrets of the Rebbetzin
I first met Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, the ageless widow of six Hasidic rabbis, at the fashionable loft of two well-known Brooklyn artists, one of whom was photographing the rebbetzin for an upcoming gallery show in Boston. Hadassah was radiant, an elegant creature in Italian shoes and tailored clothes (“I only wear couture,” she told me…
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Rock On, Moms
Josie has a keyboard she totes around the house. Periodically she puts it down, bangs on it like Mozart on a bender, scowls a bit and announces, “I’m working, like mama!” (To be truly like Mama, she’d have to curse a lot more as she typed. But close enough.) I know how fortunate I am…
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Celebrating Balanchine by Channeling His Antithesis
On June 18, Russian choreographer Boris Eifman will premiere his first ballet for the venerable New York City Ballet as part of a program to celebrate what would have been George Balanchine’s 100th birthday. At least in one respect, the match might seem to make sense: Eifman’s own company, the Eifman ballet, is based in…
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Value: More Than a Matter of Money
‘She’s worth her weight in gold.” “You look like a million dollars.” Our language often attributes measurable monetary value to human beings. In a world in which these were not merely figures of speech, what would be the actual worth of a human being? How could one tell? Who would decide? In the first eight…
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Philadelphia Story
For someone who has searched out the traces of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, the story is hauntingly familiar: a cemetery “neglected, vandalized, and filled with trash, listed on the City’s roster of abandoned properties,” as the words of a fundraising appeal put it. Nestled among the almost total disarray are toppled memorial stones, some…
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