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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It was the strangest Oscars in recent memory. Was it also the least Jewish?
The slap heard round the world stole the thunder of an evening that ended with an iconic moment of silent applause. And yet, it is the Flash’s shattering of the sound barrier that stays with me. The 94th Academy Awards featured, for the first time, an audience-polled segment ranking iconic sequences in film. As picked…
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Like Albert Camus, Zelenskyy has learned to resist the plague of the absurd
When the novel coronavirus claimed the world’s attention in 2020, so too did a novel by Albert Camus. With the quickening of the pandemic, “The Plague” became an item almost as essential as toilet paper and facemasks on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, 1,700 copies of “La Peste” were sold in January 2020…
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The Jewish jazz master who Hunter S. Thompson thought could cure any ailment
I first met Herbie Mann in January 1979, when I noticed him bursting out of a phone booth in the parking lot of Tower Records in L.A. It wasn’t the noted jazz flutist in the flesh, of course, but rather the image of him on a six-foot-tall cover of his new album, “Super Mann,” which…
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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
A son is haunted by the story of his father, who may have inadvertently set the blaze
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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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