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
-
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…
-
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…
-
Educate! Empower! Endow! And Entertain
“The myth is: We eat and non-Jews drink. Not so!” said Sylvie Sherman-Bloch to the 315 guests at the April 21 Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York benefit luncheon at The Pierre. A foundation grant recipient, the blond, attractive Sherman-Bloch, a recovering drug and alcohol addict, concluded with the unsettling query: “Is there an addict…
The Latest
-
Remnants of Babylonian Jewry Endure Tyranny of the Majority
The narrow, dusty streets of what was once Baghdad’s thriving Jewish quarter, called Betaween, are quiet on the mild spring morning. I visited them with Emad Levy, one of the last remaining Jews in the Iraqi capital. “I am proud to be a Jew, and I tell everyone I’m Jewish. I’m not afraid of anything,”…
-
May 7, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • Reports from the Pale of Settlement indicate that already bad conditions for the Jews are worsening. In Bialystock, hundreds of unemployed Jewish laborers have been reduced to begging in the streets for crusts of bread. From Vitebsk comes news that local storekeepers are no longer able to buy on credit and…
-
April 30, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • Delancey Street resident Frank Ginzberg, a tailor by trade, walked into a grocery store on Third Avenue run by his aunt and uncle, William and Mathilda Broner. Seeing Mrs. Broner at the register, Ginzberg asked where his uncle was. When his aunt answered, “He’s out. What do you need him for?”…
-
Taking the Gloss Off of ‘Shiksa Toes’
Boy, have we got shiksa problems. For millennia, Jewish men and women have treated gentile women like the half-bird, half-women Sirens of Greek mythology: beautiful, seductive creatures that have the power to draw the ship of community onto the rocks of assimilation. However, unlike the mythic Sirens, gentile women are human beings who live and…
-
How Personal Is It
Double Vision: A Self-Portrait By Walter Abish Alfred A. Knopf, 220 pages, $24. Walter Abish’s latest book is subtitled “A Self-Portrait,” and though this description suits it better than the usual “A Memoir,” “Self-Portraits” might have been even more accurate. “Double Vision” combines two alternating narratives, “The Writer-To-Be” and “The Writer.” The former details Abish’s…
-
April 23, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • When firefighters arrived to put out a fire at the Greenberg residence in Antakolye, a small suburb of Vilna, they found that the house had been ransacked and the family slaughtered. The body of Leyb Greenberg was found burned; his hands had been tied behind his back, his throat slashed. More…
-
April 16, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • While the rent strike on the Lower East Side is still in full swing, numerous landlords have shown up at the offices of the Forward to declare that they will not be raising rents. The strikes, which are multiplying by the day, are succeeding, and the strikers — simple working families…
-
Left Alone, at the Edge of the World
Lifesaving Letters: A Child’s Flight From the Holocaust By Milena Roth University of Washington Press, 192 pages, $24.95. * * *| Little Milena Roth and her parents lived an ordinary middle-class life in a pleasant part of a Jewish district in Prague. It was a large, close-knit family with grandparents and many cousins. Milena remembers…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point
- 2
News They texted about Torah and mitzvahs. Feds say they were insider trading
- 3
Opinion I run The Jewish Theological Seminary. Here’s the real story about President Isaac Herzog speaking at our commencement
- 4
Fast Forward Talarico won’t campaign with Democratic House candidate who wants to open ‘a prison for American Zionists’
In Case You Missed It
-
Yiddish World Molly Crabapple’s book is well researched but ideologically biased
-
News At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America
-
Fast Forward California judge says Kars4Kids misled donors by omitting Orthodox Jewish mission from ads
-
Fast Forward Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home