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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Biden, Putin, Zelenskyy, Penn — and the true nature of obscenity
Let’s talk about what’s obscene. First, consider what President Joe Biden considers “obscene.” “Putin has the gall to say he is “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. This lie isn’t just cynical. It is obscene,” Biden declared in a speech in Warsaw, and later tweeted. How so, one might ask? “President Zelenskyy was democratically elected. He is Jewish —…
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How Madeleine Albright downplayed then came to embrace her Jewish heritage
Albright eventually came to terms with her Jewish past past, while remaining an observant Episcopalian
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Are public Supreme Court confirmation hearings rooted in antisemitism?
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court and the first Black woman to be nominated, just completed two days of intense, and at times racially loaded, questioning in front of Congress about her qualifications for the role. In recent years, these widely-publicized hearings have become a form of political theater, with…
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‘I cry for the girls, for my father and myself’ — Isidore Abramowitz and the legend of the Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy
Why am I telling this story? Friends gently ask if I really want to do this. My frail 90-year-old brother fears for “our father’s good name.” His experience in the fire has been partially documented, and suspicion already cast and mercifully forgotten. Why revive it now? The obvious answer is that I have a few…
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Oscar-nominated ‘Bullies’ documentary opens up a much-needed conversation
Jay Rosenblatt’s “When We Were Bullies,” the Oscar-nominated documentary short film that explores how bullying continues to affect its perpetrators, couldn’t be more timely. Though the incident in question took place more than half a century ago in a Brooklyn schoolyard, it haunts the filmmaker and many of his fellow classmates who were fifth graders…
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The surprisingly Jewish history of the Rorschach inkblot test
April 2 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Hermann Rorschach, the Swiss psychoanalyst who propounded the Rorschach inkblot test, still used as a means of evaluating mental conditions. The Rorschach test immediately attracted strong support from Jewish clinicians. These included Françoise Minkowska-Brokman, of Polish ancestry, who introduced the test in France as well…
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Two hundred artworks later, has Bob Dylan finally painted his masterpiece?
Does Bob Dylan write his songs in black and white or in color? This is just one question of many that occur to a viewer after spending a few hours with the 200-odd visual artworks that comprise “Bob Dylan Retrospectrum,” on exhibit through April 17 at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum on the…
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Never have I ever missed Stephen Sondheim more than I do today
The night that Stephen Sondheim died, I went out for drinks with a new friend. We played “Never Have I Ever,” a game I hadn’t even thought of since college, and I very slowly nursed a cocktail called, romantically, the Hundred-Year-Old Dream. We stayed out for hours. Sondheim was a master of human connection. He…
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How an Orthodox Jew became the great defender of books and bookstores
In Praise of Good Bookstores By Jeff Deutsch Princeton University Press, 216 pp, $19.95 My university’s library recently announced that, in order to make space for lounges and meeting rooms, it was putting about a third of its collection into storage. But not to worry: Readers need only submit a request, and a book will…
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A Yiddish performance so versatile, it spans from ‘Mauthausen’ to Elvis Presley
With her latest project, “The Ballad of Mauthausen,” Dutch Yiddish singer Niki Jacobs has pulled off the seemingly impossible: She has recast the song cycle of the same name by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis and poet Iakovos Kambanellis as an avant-garde Yiddish cantata that remains true to the spirit of the original while extracting new…
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‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ undercuts its own feminist and Jewish identity
“Do what I say and not what I do,” seems to be the catchphrase for the newest season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” The fourth season sees comedy prodigy Miriam “Midge” Maisel rejecting the rules of a man’s world and attempting to have it all — her Upper West Side lifestyle, her job and her…
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