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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Was Elvis Presley actually the Jewish Elvis?
It is no secret that Elvis Presley had various Jewish affinities and connections throughout his life. As a teenager, for example, he lived downstairs from an Orthodox Jewish family for whom he would switch on lights on Saturdays. The so-called Memphis Mafia — his running gang of friends, helpers, and hangers-on — had a handful…
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When LA locked down, he started taking photos.
On the morning of April 1st, 2020, about two weeks after the United States entered a national state of emergency and Governor Gavin Newsom issued California’s first statewide stay-at-home order, Alon Goldsmith slung his camera bag over his shoulder, hopped on his bicycle, and began pedaling through the quiet, empty streets of the Del Rey…
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What the ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt tells us about alt-right aesthetics
Among the horde of far-right extremists who breached the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday afternoon, one man wore a hoodie that probably looked a little familiar. Featuring an arc of utility-chic font atop a simple graphic, it mimicked a ubiquitous sartorial trend: the destination sweatshirt that advertises summer camps or vacation hot spots. You’ve probably seen…
The Latest
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Musician Ariel Pink slammed for attending D.C. pro-Trump protests
Musician Ariel Pink upset fans by confirming his attendance at the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6, the same day a mob, encouraged by the president to march to the Capitol, stormed the Capitol building Filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer posted a photo of Pink, 42, who was born Ariel Marcus Rosenberg, alongside songwriter John Maus in…
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‘Pieces of a Woman’ sorts through remnants of a Holocaust legacy
“Pieces of a Woman” is a ghost story. Following an agonizing birth scene, where the baby doesn’t make it, remnants of the child’s life — or reminders of her absence — survive. The mother, Martha, wears postpartum diapers to the office and cools her sore breasts at home with frozen peas. Framed sonograms hang on…
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How science fiction warned us about the Capitol siege
Toward the end of “Logan’s Run,” Michael York and Jenny Agutter, escaping from a future society that murders people when they turn 30, enter an ivy-strangled rotunda and are soon amazed. Hearing a noise in the ostensibly empty building, York reaches down and pries off the arm of a chair on the ground. Slowly, he…
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In the shtetl of I.B. Singer’s youth, the ghosts of his past live on
In his 1978 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer employed memories from his earliest years as a source of hope for coping with the troubles of modern times: “In our home and in many other homes the eternal questions were more actual than the latest news in the Yiddish newspaper,”…
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How Slovakia’s Oscars contender revived two forgotten Holocaust heroes — an interview with Peter Bebjak
When Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba escaped Auschwitz in 1944, they didn’t just save themselves. The two men, both Slovak Jews, used data secretly compiled during their time as sonderkommandos in Auschwitz to write the eponymous Wetzler-Vrba report, which provided one of the first eyewitness accounts of the death camp’s infamous gas chambers. Publicized by…
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In a heartbreaking tribute to his son, Jamie Raskin normalizes discussion of suicide among Jews
Tommy Raskin was, by all accounts, a deeply empathetic individual, whether fighting on behalf of humans or animals. His father, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, wrote in a statement published on Medium that his son “hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious…
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‘Star Wars’ fanboy. Bar mitzvah boy. Senator? Jews react to Jon Ossoff’s path to victory
At press time, Jon Ossoff, a 33-year-old documentary film producer, is within striking distance of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate and flipping it blue. And while some reflected on the significance of this moment in a deep south plagued by historical antisemitism, a bunch more people were moved to make fun of Ossoff’s…
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Why Trump wasn’t the first Republican to appropriate Aaron Copland
An instance of presidential plagiarism provides a good occasion for considering how Aaron Copland, a gay Jewish leftist composer from Brooklyn, managed to create works of such unsurpassed Americana that they are even coveted by homophobic, antisemitic, quasi-Fascist wannabes. Minions of the current occupant of the White House recently released a post-campaign TV advertisement, which…
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