Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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They were a kosher bakery success story — 80 years later, people are still trying to make a buck off their babka
The tale of Schick's Bakery is one of 20th-century ingenuity and 21st-century capitalism
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Should We Be Colorizing Photographs From Auschwitz?
In the photograph, an adolescent girl wearing an oversized blue prison uniform stares emptily at the camera. Her tawny hair is cropped short; her face is gaunt. Her bottom lip is swollen, marked by a sliver of red blood. Like many, I first saw the photograph of Czesława Kwoka, a Polish teenager who was killed…
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Swiss Court Rules Unpublished Kafka Papers Transferred To Israel
Contemporary audiences nearly missed the chance to read most of Franz Kafka’s work. When the writer died in 1924 at the age of 40, he entrusted his manuscripts to his friend Max Brod under the condition that he burn them. The fact that we still abuse the adjective “Kafkaesque,” is proof that these terms weren’t…
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FolksbienRU’s ‘DOM №’ Is A Cool And Immersive Passover Event — But Is It For English Speakers?
Perhaps because I lack some self-awareness, I rarely feel like an outsider in my Spanish Harlem neighborhood. But last Friday night, I arrived at a secret location one block from my apartment and found myself thoroughly bewildered by surroundings that should, by rights, be more familiar to me. FolksbieneRU, (a Russian-centered partnership initiative of Genesis…
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Maybe It’s Time We Reconsidered ‘Dayenu’
In a matter of days, Jews around the world will erupt in the familiar, if irritating, tune of “Dayenu.” Maybe that chorus, a strident battery of notes that sound wrong even when they’re hit right, can explain how the title of a song meant to inspire gratitude has been co-opted into the Yiddish canon of…
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Film & TV You Can Have A ‘Game Of Thrones’ Haggadah For Your Seder
The first episode of the final season of “Game of Thrones” arrived Sunday night, and while some are already crying shame at the show’s loss of momentum, the series has picked up the pace on one score: cynical brand tie-ins. You can now learn the High Valyrian language on Duolingo and use your phrasebook to…
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As The Forverts Print Edition Comes To An End, A Passover Thought
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As many of you know, the April 2019 edition of the Forverts was the very last to come out in print. From now on, all our resources will be devoted to improving and growing our website. Although we’re very optimistic about the future of the Forverts online…
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After The American Dream, Is There Anywhere To Go But Down?
A couple of years ago, while conducting genealogical research online, I stumbled across an extraordinary document. It was a called a “Declaration of Intention” from the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, and it was signed, in a wobbly hand, by my great-grandfather, Charles Eil. By signing the form on that day — October 4, 1909…
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After The Revolution, Joshua Furst Finds The Cost Of Freedom
REVOLUTIONARIES: A NOVEL By Joshua Furst Alfred A. Knopf: 352 pages, $26.95 It’s hard to write historical fiction about recent history. That’s because history itself is, or has become, its own kind of fiction, told and retold, preserved in sound and image, as if these were windows we might open and climb through. Want to…
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WATCH: On His 130th Birthday, Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Immigrant’ Is Worth Another Look
Hopeful individuals and families cross an ocean, only to arrive in a strange country where, still culturally and financially at sea, they scrape by dint of their wiles and compassion for one another. Yes, Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 short film “The Immigrant” presents a romanticized caricature of the immigrant experience. Still, in a time when the…
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Art What Jews Might Have Lost In the Fire at Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral
As flames devastated Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral on April 15, more than just a worldwide center of Catholic worship and an architectural masterpiece was threatened. Jewish history is also reflected in the cathedral, for better and for worse. When its massive construction began almost one thousand years ago, Notre-Dame de Paris reflected theological messages that…
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How Notre Dame Became A Symbol Of Inclusion For All Of Us
In early 1981, Pope John Paul II announced his choice as the new Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger. Not only did Lustiger share the pope’s youth and dynamism, but he apparently shared his ethnic background. Lustiger was, in fact, widely (and not always kindly) known as “the Pole”—a reference to his parental heritage. Upon being…
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