Culture

The Secret Jewish History Of Woodstock

This August marks the 50th anniversary of the original Woodstock festival, which took place in Bethel, N.Y., on August 15-17, 1969. Woodstock lives on in memory as the culmination of the 1960s counterculture, the greatest rock festival of all time, and just plain and simply as shorthand for “the Sixties,” as in “the Woodstock generation.”…

Remembering Hal Prince, Who Made Broadway Modern

There you are: Driving to work, doing the dishes, or — let’s be serious — in your shower, singing “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Cabaret,” or “West Side Story.” If you’re into Broadway deep cuts, maybe “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Sure, the songs come from Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick; Andrew…

Yuval Noah Harari Insists The Russian Edition Of His Book Doesn’t Change The Facts

The exact content, if not the nature of the lessons, in Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” may be lost in translation. Harari has faced a backlash in recent days after news broke that the Russian edition of his latest book elided criticisms of Vladimir Putin and substantially changed a…

Q & A: On Primo Levi’s Centenary, Reflecting On A Writer Who Was ‘The Perfect Scientist’

Primo Levi was, by any measure, a remarkable man. The chemist and writer, born in Turin, Italy on July 31, 1919, is most famous in America for his memoirs of his experience during the Holocaust. And those memoirs, foremost among them “If This is a Man,” which surveys Levi’s time in the Italian resistance and…

Michael Flug, Caretaker And Maker Of Civil Rights History, Dies At 74

Michael Flug, a civil rights, labor organizer and the longtime Chicago library archivist for the Midwest’s largest collection of African American historical documents, died July 11. He was 74. Flug’s life was one committed to service. As a student at Columbia University, Flug was active in CORE – the Congress of Racial Equality, a leading…

WATCH: Preparing Indian Lemon Rice – In Yiddish!

Q&A: Steven Greenhouse on labor’s past, present and future

'We talk about American exceptionalism, and one thing that’s exceptional is corporate power in America is much stronger'

Tarantino’s “Hollywood” Has A Polanski Problem

This post contains major plot spoilers for “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.” In “The White Album,” Joan Didion famously described the atmosphere of California in the aftermath of the Tate murders. “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly,” Didion wrote, “and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember…

Seven Centuries Later, A Jewish Treasure Trove Tells A Tragic Tale

Getting to The Colmar Treasure, a fourteenth century time capsule now on view at the Met Cloisters, is an adventure in itself, no matter how many times you have walked up the steep curving path through Fort Tryon Park with its picturesque cliffs and views of the Palisades. The Cloisters, a 1938 complex that incorporates…