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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From Hungary — wild poems of Hasidic rabbis and brutal murderers
There are very few poetry collections which grow out of a backstory like the unspeakable one which powers the major Hungarian poet Szilárd Borbély’s “Final Matters,” and which left me shaking. “At two in the morning, his father had heard noises at the front door: he opened it and was struck on the head, falling…
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Film & TV On Neil Diamond’s birthday, his most cringe-worthy moment
Editor’s note: Today is Neil Diamond’s 79th birthday. To mark the occasion, we’re revisiting this essay about the part the singer-songwriter played in one of Jewish cinema’s most peculiar moments. On October 6th 1927, the original film production of “The Jazz Singer” made its world premiere at the Warners’ Theatre in midtown Manhattan. (I know,…
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75 years ago, Auschwitz was liberated – here’s how the world is remembering
On January 27, 1945, the nightmare ended for some. 75 years ago Monday, the Soviets liberated Auschwitz. They found the camp unguarded, the Nazi guards having fled with the bulk of the prisoners ahead of the Red Army’s advance. Around 7,000 — most of whom were sick and dying — were released, by the Soviets….
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In this shattering film, the faustian allure of Nazism
When you study the long, infuriating, and infuriatingly long careers of the Third Reich’s major creative figures, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the public doesn’t give a shit about art. The propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl were invaluable weapons for the Nazi Party of the 1930s, but after the war she was…
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50 years later, ‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’ is a Holocaust film like no other
On a summer day in the northern Italian city of Ferrara, a band of youths, dressed in immaculate white, arrive at the walled gates of a garden, open to the public for the first time in a decade. They are there at the invitation of the young lady of the manor for a tennis tournament….
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In Amsterdam, borne back ceaselessly into a Jewish past
House on Endless Waters By Emuna Elon; translated from Hebrew by Anthony Berris and Linda Yechiel Atria Books, 320 pages, $27 The plot of Emuna Elon’s lovely novel – about history, fiction and the importance of family ties — begins with a broken promise: The prominent Israeli novelist Yoel Blum has agreed to return to…
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How Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott identified with the Jews
Editor’s Note: Derek Walcott would have turned 90 today. In honor of this date, we’re revisiting this essay written on the occasion of the poet’s death on March 17, 2017. Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from the West Indies who died March 17 at age 87, was long inspired by Jewish culture, history and…
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Watch: Peter Beinart, Jodi Rudoren chat Israel, 2020 elections
Join Forward editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren in conversation about Israel with Peter Beinart, CUNY professor, editor at large for Jewish Currents, contributor to The Atlantic and author of “The Crisis of Zionism”. Their discussion, “Is Peace Possible?,” will take place on February 9 at 5 p.m. at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. To find out…
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Jeff Goldblum, Marc Maron and Terry Gross find their roots
Two celebrated interviewers and perhaps the most eccentric interview subject of all time, learned about their shared Jewish pasts in Eastern Europe on PBS’s “Finding Your Roots.” On the January 21 episode of the series, podcaster and comedian Marc Maron, “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross and actor Jeff Goldblum found common ground: Namely, the Eastern…
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Art Did Walter Benjamin understand his prize possession — Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus?
Of all the icons to emerge from the left-wing politics of the last century, it is among the most talked about and the least looked at, the most mystical and the most frightening. It is probably the unlikeliest and also, by a country mile, the weirdest. Its caretakers make up the most exclusive club in…
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Yes, exclusion of women in Jewish Studies is still a problem
To The Editor: The Forward recently published an article by Marcin Wodzinski that was framed as a response to an article we wrote for the Forward more than a year ago about women’s underrepresentation in our field of Jewish Studies. Our original article expressed profound concern that a new 850-page history of Hasidism had no…
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Fast Forward Nation’s largest teachers union rejects move to cut ties with ADL
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Culture In this Holocaust story, there are few words, no swastikas, no yellow stars — just movement, passion and empathy
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