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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The secret Jewish history of Muhammad Ali
Editor’s Note: The boxer and civil rights icon Muhammad Ali, who died on June 3, 2016, at the age of 74, would have turned 78 today. On this occasion, we return to this story about the champ’s complex relationship with the Jewish people. Muhammad Ali was accused of having “frequently clashed with the Jewish people.”…
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She shattered the glass coffin of fairy tale endings
For a period of six weeks in 1994, the artist Rachel Feinstein slept in a makeshift gingerbread house on display at Exit Art, a Manhattan gallery. The performance was called “Let the Artist Live,” and Feinstein could be glimpsed, in sleeping pill-aided slumber, through the window of the house, resembling a dreamy if slightly debauched…
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Where are all the Others in Jewish Studies
In 2018, the Forward published and article by Susannah Heschel and Sarah Imhoff headlined “Where Are All the Women in Jewish Studies?” They highlighted the book, Hasidism: A New History, whose eight authors are all men. As one of those eight, I was tempted to respond. After a few exchanges with colleagues, however, I realized…
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How the Trumps and Kushners corrupted the American Dream
American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power By Andrea Bernstein W.W. Norton & Company, 496 pages, $30 For those of us who don’t have power, it’s difficult to comprehend exactly how it works. The ordinary things we do to move our lives forward — make budgets, pay bills, try…
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Deborah Lipstadt, Etgar Keret and Ilya Kaminsky take home National Jewish Book Awards
Updated, January 17, 4:32 pm: This story has been updated to include a list to the complete list of winners of the 2019 awards. Short tales of whimsy, a new translation of the Bible, unsung American matriarchs and two rousing calls to combat the so-called “oldest hatred:” These are the winners of the 69th Annual…
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The Kafkaesque story of how Kafka’s “Trial” got cancelled
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include the Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s response to NYU Skirball’s statement that “The Trial” was cancelled due to its decision to withdraw funds. A stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” which was set to debut in New York at the NYU Skirball Center March 7, has been…
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“My Polish Honeymoon” proves you really can make a rom-com out of anything — even Holocaust tourism
Kazimierz, Krakow’s Jewish quarter, was once home to thousands of Jews. Today it boasts seven intact synagogues, a rarity in Eastern Europe, and a vibrant bohemian cafe scene. In its souvenir shops, you can buy tasteful notebooks stamped with the Yiddish alphabet, Instagrammable postcards of fin-de-siècle bourgeois Jewish life, and statuettes of hook-nosed Jews holding…
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Why Ladino will rise again
A sold-out crowd packed the house at the Center for Jewish History — and even filled an overflow room viewing the proceedings on screen — at the third annual Ladino Day in New York, home to the largest Sephardic community in America. Tight security and what speakers described as a “daunting time” for “Jews and…
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She was the first Jewish actor to win an Oscar
Each year, the Oscars are a who’s who of Jews. We are routinely represented in winners, losers, hosts and weird kissers (cough, cough Adrien Brody.) Too often, the awards go to boychiks. This year, with no women nominees for director (either Jewish or gentile), we wondered who was was the first Jewish woman to take…
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OscarsSoBoring: What the nominees tell us about 2020
The first weeks of 2020 already feel like a retread of lowlights from years past. A calamitous environmental crisis, an impeachment trial and a teaser of a new, ill-advised war in the Middle East. And then there are the Oscar nominees. This year, like just about every year, shows an Academy unwilling to embrace new…
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The secret Jewish history of Dr. Dolittle
Robert Downey Jr. presumably had a better time making the new movie “Dolittle,” based on Hugh Lofting’s “Doctor Dolittle” stories and opening in theaters on Friday, January 17, than did his fellow Jew, Anthony Newley, who had a miserable experience on the set of the original 1967 “Doctor Dolittle” film version, which starred Rex Harrison….
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