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
-
What was Jewish about Jimmy Durante? More than you might think.
This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of the entertainer Jimmy Durante (1893-1980), whose artistry was linked with Yiddishkeit. Durante’s nickname, Schnozzola, is an American adaptation of the Yiddish slang term schnoz for nose. An able jazz pianist and endearing comedian, Durante was also capable of poignant singing. When he performed the German…
-
Your top 9 Yiddish antifa anthems: a revolutionary playlist
The Yiddish roots of antifa – the anti-fascist movement whose precursors date back at least as far as opposition to the Russian czar – have been well documented. They are also enshrined in a canon of Yiddish antifa songs – songs of resistance, anarchism, revolution, and workers’ rights – that listeners might find eerily resonant…
-
What Trump (and Masha Gessen) can teach us about autocracy
Surviving Autocracy By Masha Gessen Riverhead Books, 270 pages, $26 Everything seems to move more quickly these days, including publishing. The epilogue of Masha Gessen’s “Surviving Autocracy,” a polemic urging resistance to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian inclinations, is dated April 2020. It’s topical enough to reference both the COVID-19 crisis and the administration’s “disastrous” response….
The Latest
-
Trump’s church photo has no American precedent. Does it have one in fascism?
It was the photo op that transfixed the nation. Early Monday evening, President Trump, accompanied by a small cadre of staff and press, marched from the White House through Lafayette Square to St. John’s Episcopal church, where every president since James Madison has attended services. He had just given a speech threatening to use the…
-
Why I’ll always be grateful to Bruce Jay Friedman
A few years ago I called Bruce Jay Friedman to thank him for helping give shape to my life. He quickly brushed aside my thanks, and a little less quickly declined my invitation for lunch. He’d been ailing for a while, and wasn’t getting out of his apartment much. But he was firm about continuing…
-
A 90-year-old Minneapolis artist lost it all in a protest fire — he’s ready to start over
On May 30, Aribert Munzner’s art studio in South Minneapolis caught fire and was doused with 1,000 gallons of water. Protesters responding to the death of George Floyd burned a bar across the street and the wind picked up embers that landed on the Civil War-era Ivy Arts Building’s wooden roof. The fire department quickly…
-
In ‘Chained’ a power-mad cop loses control of his family
Love can be tough, and tougher still to watch. In Yaron Shani’s “Chained,” we witness, from suffocating angles, how one man’s intense brand of caring and need for control destroys his world. The film, which is streaming online as part of the Manhattan JCC’s virtual Israel Film Center Festival June 10 and 11, is the…
-
How about a second season of ‘Unorthodox’ to cure the ills of the first?
The response to the Netflix hit show “Unorthodox” has been huge. Breaking expectations and hitting the Netflix top ten list in such unlikely locations as Saudi Arabia, the show has been the entry point for many viewers to learn about the Hasidic community. However, as the show has become the de facto spokesperson for Judaism,…
-
WATCH NOW July 8: An exit interview with Amb. Dani Dayan
Watch the recording here. Ambassador Dayan is heading home after four years as Israel’s Consul General in the New York area. What has he learned about American Jewry and our relationship with the Jewish state? How has the experience changed his understanding of U.S. politics — and Israel’s? Join Jodi Rudoren and Andrew Silow-Carroll, editors-in-chief…
-
Books Is there any good time to publish a book during a pandemic?
“Timing is everything.” Larry Cohler-Esses wrote that line in 1995 in a Forward news story about my book contract with Simon and Schuster. I was the American Jewish Committee’s expert on antisemitism at the time. I had written a report on the militia movement ten days before the Oklahoma City bombing predicting attacks on government…
-
Why Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ is the perfect poem for these times
In this spring of fear and torment, COVID Spring, a spring when we mourn our dead, Jews are saying Kaddish too many times. When I grew up in a casually Jewish household we lit yahrzeit candles, and nothing focused my thoughts on the passing of all things like the familiar melody of Kaddish, As I…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News ‘It’s the Jews’: San Diego mosque shooters decried ‘the universal enemy’ in hate-filled manifesto
- 2
Music For Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, an 85-minute playlist
- 3
Opinion Netanyahu is facing electoral catastrophe — and could place Israel in existential peril
- 4
Culture Proposal to ban Israeli products roils a Brooklyn members-only grocery
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Massive fire breaks out at kosher supermarket in London’s Golders Green
-
Books Reading a Pakistani author’s 30-year-old novel helped me understand my parents’ views on intermarriage
-
Yiddish נײַ־אַנטדעקטע פּרטים וועגן די סאָוועטישע ייִדן צווישן 1945 און 1953Newly discovered details about Soviet Jewry between 1945 and 1953
אַנאַ שטערנשיס האָט געזאַמלט הונדערטער בעל־פּהיִקע גבֿית־עדותן פֿון מענער און פֿרױען פֿון פֿאַרשײדענע סאָציאַלע שיכטן.
-
Fast Forward Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop votes to boycott Israeli products