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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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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When 250 Orthodox Jewish Immigrants Worked As Extras For Cecil B. DeMille
Among the thousands of extras Cecil B. DeMille hired for his original, silent version of “The Ten Commandments” were 250 Orthodox Jewish immigrants, newly arrived in Los Angeles from Eastern Europe The director hoped that they would lend a sense of human verisimilitude to the project: “We believed rightly that, both in appearance and in…
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The Secret Jewish History of Tax Day
Like it or not — and who among us actually likes it — come April 15, you will need to have filed your income tax return with the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps one way to feel better about the painful and often inconvenient process is to recognize that it has roots in the biblical concept…
The Latest
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Novelist Joshua Furst On His Book ‘Revolutionaries,’ Abbie Hoffman And Countercultures
Rare is the Jew who doesn’t bring up his or her parents in a therapy session. As the tribe that created psychoanalysis, we may be predisposed to thinking our childhoods were messed up. But few Jews can claim they spent their early years waiting for the homecoming of their famous fugitive father or hanging around…
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Film & TV New York’s First Nelly Kaplan Retrospective Pays Tribute To A Fierce, Forgotten Filmmaker
Like the fierce women she committed to the screen, the young Nelly Kaplan was a risk-taker, unafraid to break barriers, or, for that matter, marriages. The Argentinian-born director arrived in France in 1953. She was 22, didn’t speak a word of French and had a meager $50 to her name, but within two years she…
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Adult Swim’s ‘Lazor Wulf’ Is A Show About A Laser Wolf, Not The ‘Fiddler’ Butcher, Lazar Wolf
Lazar Wolf is a creation of the great Yiddish fiction writer Sholem Aleichem. He is Anatevka’s village butcher. In “Fiddler on the Roof,” the 1964 musical treatment of Aleichem’s Tevye the Milk Man stories, Wolf is best remembered for being a wealthy older suitor to Tevye’s daughter Tzeitel. He doesn’t end up marrying her (Motel…
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At Henry Street, The Fight For Immigrant Rights Endures
“Scorn of the immigrant is not peculiar to our generation,” the progressive reformer and nurse Lillian Wald wrote in “The House on Henry Street,” the memoir she wrote in 1915. That was 22 years after she had traded in her plan to become a doctor for a life spent helping the polyglot residents of the…
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Two Forward Writers Nominated For 2019 Deadline Club Awards
Two writers from the Forward are finalists for awards from the Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Club announced Monday. Deputy Culture Editor Talya Zax was one of three journalists nominated in the category of Arts Reporting for her December 2018 cover story, “Men Explain Anne Frank…
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Virginia School District Apologizes For Student’s ‘Jewish People’ Drawing
The superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia has publicly apologized for a student drawing that many deemed anti-Semitic. The picture, displayed at Northern Virginia Community College’s Annandale campus between February 14 and March 14, was one of eight drawings made by a 17-year-old high school student as part of a series titled “Racial…
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Can ‘Tootsie’ Turn Men Into Mensches In The #MeToo Era?
After winning Tony and Grammy awards for his score for “The Band’s Visit,” composer-lyricist David Yazbek is poised for another Broadway hit with the musical adaptation of Sydney Pollack’s 1982 film classic, “Tootsie.” With book writer Robert Horn and director Scott Ellis, Yazbek (“The Full Monty,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” “Women on the Verge of a…
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In a Kraków Basement, Awkward Objects of Genocide
At the entrance to the temporary exhibition in Esterka’s House, a branch of the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków, there is a photograph of the collections storage of the Warsaw State Ethnographic Museum. The photograph shows rows of densely populated shelves: in the space of just a few cubic meters, hundreds of hand-carved figurines are consorting….
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125 Years Later, The Dreyfus Affair Remains Unfortunately Relevant
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, on the morning of October 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a staff member of the French military high command, kissed his wife and children good-bye at their Paris apartment. Neither he nor his family suspected they would not again see one another for four years. Ordered to report to…
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