Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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How Ady Barkan’s story sparked a movement
Editor’s Note: “Not Going Quietly” is premiering on PBS’ “POV” Monday, Jan. 24 at 10 p.m. To mark it’s TV debut we have republished this interview with director Nicholas Bruckman from August 11, 2021. When Nicholas Bruckman met Ady Barkan in early 2018, he was prepared to be bummed out. Barkan had just confronted then-Senator…
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Is ‘Rifkin’s Festival’ Woody Allen’s love letter to cinema — or something more cynical?
“Rifkin’s Festival,” Woody Allen’s 49th feature, has a marketing problem. I’m not really alluding to the obvious issues. Not the HBO series about the alleged – and denied by Allen – sexual abuse of his daughter Dylan Farrow (full disclosure, I was a talking head in said series). Or even something like the #MeToo press…
The Latest
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Why some Israelis are finally confronting what happened in 1948 in a village called Tantura
One week after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, (and three days before the Israeli Defense Forces were created), a large-scale massacre of more than 200 Arabs allegedly occurred in the Palestinian village of Tantura. This event was one incident in wars from 1947-1949, a period that Israeli Jews call the War…
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Finding pleasure in grief, an elderly Jewish widow discovers the best way to stay alive
It sounds like a pat narrative — a grieving elderly widow discovers a new, thrilling version of herself in the wake of her husband’s death, learning to indulge in the twilight of her life. The message implicit in such a tale usually goes something like this: society-bound elders, having spent most of their lives in…
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‘A chance to change the world’ — new initiative to elevate voices and experiences of Jews of Color
A new initiative to recover, study and elevate the voices and experiences of Jews of Color in the United States is launching at the University of Colorado Boulder with the support of a three-year, $250,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. “Jews of Color: Histories and Futures” is spearheaded by Samira K. Mehta, assistant professor…
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In the story of Ethiopian Jewish immigration, is Israel really the hero?
When we hear about racism or discrimination in Israel, it is usually about Jewish-Arab relations. It is far more rare that we hear the complicated story of Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community, who also face discrimination in the country. Usually, if we hear anything about their plight, we hear of Israel heroically airlifting thousands…
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The best Jewish TV, movies and books to look out for in 2022
2020 and 2021 will likely not be remembered as the most enjoyable years in American history, but if 2022 turns out to also be a dud, at least there will still be lots of fresh reading and viewing material for us to engage with from our childhood bedrooms and underground bunkers. The year brings the…
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For Jews, Texas is beginning to look more like France (that’s not a good thing)
This week marked the start of spring semester at my place of work, the University of Houston. In one of my classes, devoted to the French Enlightenment, I launched into my rather tired explanation why it was important to understand this era. I told my students that so much that our world has since witnessed…
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Is it possible to love the world’s most ubiquitous Jewish intellectual as much as he loves himself?
One of the sweetest privileges of living in the United States of America is the ability to go decades without knowing what a “Bernard-Henri Lévy” is. My own honeymoon of ignorance ended a few years back, when the latest storm of Roman Polanski takes swept across the internet and it came to my attention that…
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In Nazi-looted art case at Supreme Court, one (brief) moment of levity
Despite being mired in legalese, the oral argument at the Supreme Court for the case Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation regarding the Nazi-looted Camille Pissarro painting had one moment of levity. About an hour in, Justice Stephen Breyer asked, “Can everyone agree that this is a beautiful painting?” It was the first direct mention of…
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For more than a century, a Jewish artist from Auschwitz reveled in nature and visual delight
Tova Berlinski, who died Jan. 16 at age 106, proved that where Jewish artists are born is less important than what they create from those origins. Berlinski’s hometown was Oświęcim, which then belonged to the Habsburg Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and is now part of Poland. She later described the town to interviewers as…
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News How Jewish can you be in a Boca country club? Wrapping tefillin got a family suspended, lawsuit says
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News An Alabama millionaire offered Jews $50,000 to move to his town. 16 years later, what’s left?
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Opinion Mike Huckabee’s stunning, terrifying new gift to the Israeli right
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Opinion Trump is forcing liberal Zionists to confront an extraordinarily inconvenient truth
In Case You Missed It
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Opinion Zohran Mamdani is right about what ‘intifada’ means — well, kind of
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Opinion Will the U.S. get involved in Iran? Mike Huckabee’s evangelical worldview may be the key
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Fast Forward Trump is keeping the world guessing about his Iran intentions. Could his first term offer clues?
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Fast Forward In tearful address, Mamdani laments criticism following his ‘globalize the intifada’ comments
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