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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Books In the Italian city where James Joyce wrote ‘Ulysses’ a Jewish poet’s bookstore rises back to life
In 1919, Umberto Saba opened an antiquarian bookstore; a century later, the people of Trieste saved it
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The Secret Jewish History Of Peter Tork
Peter Tork, who died on February 21 at age 77, proved that enduring pop stardom was less meaningful than the quest to understand oneself and the world. Tork won international acclaim as the keyboardist and bass guitarist of the Monkees. His mother Virginia Straus had German Jewish roots, and Tork would include Yiddish phrases in…
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‘Porgy And Bess,’ ‘Akhnaten’ To Lead Met Opera’s 2019-2020 Season
After almost three decades, the Charleston-set “Porgy and Bess” is coming back to the Upper West Side. The Metropolitan Opera’s 2019-2020 season, announced on February 20, will open on September 23 with a new production of Ira and George Gershwin’s folk opera, the first since 1990. The staging, brought over by director James Robinson after…
The Latest
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Film & TV On Disney Channel’s ‘Andi Mack,’ Yet Another Jewish Story
“Andi Mack” was not on TV last Friday, so my evening was not as enjoyable as it usually was. Almost a year ago, I wrote about how I am a lover of shows on Disney Channel. Some people might find this odd, as I am a childless, middle-aged adult who is not a teacher. However,…
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Film & TV When New Journalism And The New Hollywood Both Died In Darkness
If you watch a lot of films, you might get the sense that journalism is a very dramatic business — there’s a reason why the Washington Post’s Trump-era slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” reads like something you might find on a movie poster. Joan Micklin Silver’s 1977 comedy “Between the Lines,” opening on Friday for…
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What Hebrew Means To Americans
What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) Edited by Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg University of Washington Press, $30 In the 1980s, the king of minimalist fiction, Raymond Carver, published a story titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Both the story…
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Film & TV ‘Curb’ Director Larry Charles Feared Getting Comfortable, Now He’s Swapping Jokes With ISIS
In many ways, Larry Charles has stuck quite close to his creative associate Larry David. They met as writers on the show “Fridays” in the 1980s, collaborated as writer-producers on “Seinfeld” through the ‘90s and continued their partnership well into the new millennium with Charles’ directing on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” But while David, at least…
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At The Yasser Arafat Museum, Revisionist History And Missing Facts
For a Jew, visiting the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah is an unsettling experience. Arafat, who would have turned 90 this year, is the closest thing Palestinians have to a Founding Father — their George Washington or David Ben-Gurion — except that his dream of an independent Palestine still is not realized 14 years after…
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Books Ottessa Moshfegh Fangirled Out At Whoopi Goldberg’s House
Author Ottessa Moshfegh has defied the old warning, “never meet your heroes.” She wasn’t disappointed. Those who’ve read Moshfegh’s second novel, 2018’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” won’t have much trouble guessing who that hero is. Like her book’s unnamed protagonist, who spends a year fettered to her bed self-prescribing medication and binging films…
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Theater A ‘Lolita’ Musical Flopped 50 Years Ago. After #MeToo, Does It Have A Future?
Almost no one wanted to publish Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” After multiple rejections, the Russian writer finally managed to place the novel at Olympia Press, a publisher with a reputation for accepting borderline pornographic work, in 1955. While many might have applied those terms to “Lolita,” the narrator of which, Humbert Humbert, is a pedophile, Nabokov…
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In Defense Of Education, Against Hucksters And Sorcery
Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American By Ilana Blumberg Rutgers University Press, 210 pages, $19.95 American popular culture lies to us about teachers. It tells us they ought to be magical. Teachers, in the American imagination, enter schools as shadowy outsiders, often inexplicably. It doesn’t matter whether we are in…
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The Bitter Nostalgia Of Italian Jews, Captured By A Modernist Master
Italy: We long to be there. Red stone buildings and gelato; sun-struck days and soaring basilicas. “A Room With a View.” Katharine Hepburn in “Summertime.” Audrey Hepburn, liberated and love struck in “Roman Holiday.” One of the many fascinations of Giorgio Bassani’s “The Novel of Ferrara,” a compendium of six interlinked novels examining the lives…
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