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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In cricket, instances of antisemitism amid a rich Jewish history
Is cricket, passionately played in England and its former colonies, undergoing an antisemitism crisis? So asked the English Jewish barrister Daniel Lightman in a recent article in the right-wing outlet The Spectator. The cricket world was jarred after Azeem Rafiq, a former player of Pakistani origin, admitted that, as a teenager, he had posted mocking…
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Genius, jerk, misogynist, everyman — the many lives of Saul Bellow
Asaf Galay’s documentary “The Adventures of Saul Bellow,” with its play on the title of Bellow’s breakthrough 1953 novel, “The Adventures of Augie March,” adroitly signals its intentions: not just to thumbnail the writer’s picaresque life and literary career, but to seek out correspondences between the two. With Bellow, who died at 89 in 2005,…
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No, she wasn’t Jewish, but Betty White had a very Jewish century
There was nothing Jewish about Betty White. I mean yes, she had a blind date with Carl Reiner in 2010 on “Hot in Cleveland” when they were both 88. Yes, she played one of four retired “Golden Girls” living together in Florida, none of whom were Jewish but, y’know. And yes, she was on the…
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How an antisemitic attack gave rise to a pro-IDF social media movement
After two Brooklyn 21-year-olds wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with the logo for the Israel Defense Forces were allegedly attacked by two men who called them “dirty Jews,” a social media movement is striking back. The #IDFshirtchallenge asks users to post pictures of themselves proudly sporting their IDF apparel on both Twitter and Instagram, and figures such…
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22 absolutely on-the-mark pop culture predictions for 2022
2021 was a year of new beginnings — not just for our newly reopened society, but also for the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to mutate into increasingly scary-sounding novel Greek letter variants. And so, we end 2021 on a note of uncertainty. In a year like this, when Taylor Swift surprised us with a 10-minute…
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In ‘Curb,’ not even Alexander Vindman is safe from Larry David’s warped worldview
After 11 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David, the master of his own moral universe, finally found a worthy foil in America’s other most upstanding Jew. On the show’s season finale, which aired Sunday, David met Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the man who blew the whistle on President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr…
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What we look at when we look at Joan Didion
It’s the first thing I think about when I think about Joan Didion: not the extraordinary grace of her storytelling or her magical sense of language — those come right after — but a portrait of her, taken in 1996 by the great Jewish photographer Irving Penn. Joan Didion by Irving Penn pic.twitter.com/KvqkIdLSHa — Daniel_F_Brami…
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How the son of an Auschwitz survivor made it (really) big on Broadway
This season, the hottest director on Broadway is a 75-year-old son of Holocaust survivors. Fresh off “Mrs. Doubtfire,” the musical adaptation of the Robin Williams vehicle, Jerry Zaks is putting the finishing touches on “The Music Man,” which opens in February starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. “Yeah, it’s unbelievable,” said Zaks remarking on his…
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Does ‘A Christmas Carol’ have an antisemitic message or a Jewish humanist one?
The name Ebenezer is Hebrew, deriving from the phrase eben ha-ezer, meaning “stone of the help”
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The Holocaust robbed them of their stories; this artist is bringing them back to life
In his new graphic nonfiction narrative book “When I Grow Up, the Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers,” author and New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein deftly gives life to the never-told stories of six Jewish teenagers in the lost world of Yiddishuania, formerly Poland/Lithuania. In the 1930s, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, then based…
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What ever became of the Hasid from Japan — a quintessentially New York Jewish story
In my work as a reporter in the New York Bureau of a Japanese newspaper, I used to periodically interview Henry Kissinger. Every couple of years, for nearly two decades, I’d accompany a colleague from Japan and pay a visit to Kissinger Associates on Park Avenue. In much of East Asia, Kissinger is still viewed…
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Fast Forward Robert Jay Lifton, pioneering scholar of Nazi doctors and Jewish memory, dies at 98
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Fast Forward LA Holocaust museum retracts social media post that said, ‘Never again can’t only mean never again for Jews’
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