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 Jews are key to Chinatown’s survival
My last indoor dining experience of 2020 was in early March. I had crispy roast duck, watercress and assorted dumplings at Wu’s Wonton King, at the junction of Chinatown and the historic Jewish Lower East Side. Located at the foot of the Forward Building, Wu’s occupies the site of the old Garden Cafeteria, what used…
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Prairie Sonata: A new novel of Canadian Jewish life
Read this article in Yiddish. Prairie Sonata Sandy Shefrin Rabin FriesenPress, 2020, 288 pp. Yiddish culture always had better luck in Canada than in the United States. Partly this was because Jewish immigrants to Canada were more cohesive and better organized, and Canadian society in general displayed greater respect for cultural diversity. As a result,…
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What We Get Wrong About Karl Marx
While never a believer in Judaism, and at times vicious about the faith, the revolutionary philosopher Karl Marx came from an indisputably Jewish background: Both of his parents’ fathers were rabbis. The fact that he was not, himself, Jewish is the result of a curious historical circumstance. Marx’s father, Heinrich, born Herschel Levi, earned his…
The Latest
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Michelle Zauner’s new memoir will tell you how grief tastes
If you don’t think great human drama can play out in a supermarket, just read the first pages of Michelle Zauner’s new memoir, “Crying in H Mart.” The largest Asian supermarket chain in the United States, H Mart takes its first initial from the Korean phrase han ah reum, which means “one arm full of…
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Bridge isn’t just for your grandparents anymore
When I think of bridge, I think of my grandmother, who played regularly with her bridge club until she died. I associate the game with a sort of 1950s housewife aesthetic, and the elderly. The whole thing feels quaint. But according to “Dirty Tricks,” a documentary that premiered Thursday at the Hot Docs festival, bridge…
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Why Jeff Goldblum, living meme and baboon whisperer, still matters
They, uh, broke the mold when they made Jeff Goldblum. A delightful eccentric, whose charms lean into singularity, is a kind of cultural anomaly when it comes to lasting power. His iconography — from his “Creation of Adam”-recline in “Jurassic Park,” to a straight-ahead shot of his face from “The Fly” that adorned bathroom stalls…
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Inside the Hidden History of Rosenwald Schools
Julius Rosenwald, the son of Jewish immigrants who fled religious persecution in Germany, turned Sears, Roebuck & Co. into America’s largest retailer. Booker T. Washington, who was born into slavery, created the Tuskegee Institute and led the college for more than 30 years. Their groundbreaking partnership in the early decades of the 20th century led…
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My mother, my dream and Mama Rose
My mother, Lily, was born in 1911 on a dining room table in the Bronx. She would live through World War I, the Spanish Flu, Women’s Suffrage, the Roaring Twenties, the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, and World War II before she was 30. She took her final bow on June 23, 2014 at…
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So many years after the Holocaust, still an unbearable silence
She died too young, too, too young. So, memories are few. It’s the boiled tongue I remember, the very large cow’s tongue – like yours and mine. Don’t recall the cooking. Did water get changed in the very large pot, before it was done? The pink meat was speckled with white. What did it taste…
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Remembering Anne Douglas, a woman of charity and a late convert to Judaism
Anne Buydens Douglas, who died April 29 at age 102, collaborated with her husband Kirk Douglas in extraordinarily generous philanthropic ventures. The couple, both of whom reached their centenary, showed that advanced age can be accompanied by heightened humanistic values. Born Hannelore Marx in Hanover, Germany, to a family of wealthy industrialists, she acquired business…
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Why Jews are still crazy about mahjong
From the 1920s until today, mahjong has captured the imagination of American Jewish players like few other games. Annelise Heinz, who teaches at the University of Oregon, is the author of “Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture.” Recently, I spoke with Heinz about what mahjong has meant to Jewish communities….
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