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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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…
The Latest
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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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How a Bronx kid with stage fright reinvented himself as the great sage of Jewish history
The French historian Sylvie Anne Goldberg is author of “Clepsydra: Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism” and “Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague.” Her “Transmitting Jewish History” collects autobiographical conversations with the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Recently, Professor Goldberg discussed with Benjamin Ivry, who translated…
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Once a Jewish hero of the counterculture, Aron Kay looks back on his pie-throwing days
At the end of a 1995 oral history recorded for the USC Shoah Foundation, Holocaust survivor Mary Kay was asked about her children and grandchildren. When she got to her eldest son, she indicated that he lived in New York but declared, “I can’t tell you what he does.” Kay was not about to kvell…
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Yiddish טשיקאַוועסן: דער ערשטער דירעקטאָר פֿונעם „פּולין מוזיי“ איז דאָ צוריקTidbits: The first director of the Polin Museum is back
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