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
-
That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
-
Why Is This Passover Different From All Others? In Iceland, It’s Because The Rabbi Lives There.
On the face of it, this year’s Passover in Reykjavik, Iceland resembled last year’s celebration. Both were held in a downtown hotel meeting room set with a dozen long tables. And both had relatively casual atmospheres, featuring bottled water, plastic silverware and bronze and white paper seder plates. But the two holidays couldn’t have been…
-
Film & TV Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ Is 40. Can We Still Admire It In 2019?
When Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn began their relationship, she was a 21-year-old college freshman and the adopted daughter of Allen’s longtime partner, Mia Farrow. He was 56 and had already directed “Manhattan.” Their nearly three-decade-long romantic involvement has made the film, which turns 40 on April 25 and involves a love affair between 42-year-old…
The Latest
-
‘Children Of A Lesser God’ Playwright Mark Medoff Is Dead At 79
“Children of a Lesser God” playwright Mark Medoff, whose work elevated deaf actors on stage and screen, died April 23 at the age of 79. Medoff had been battling cancer and passed away in hospice care, Las Cruces Sun News reported. Medoff was born to Jewish parents in Mount Carmel, Illinois on March 18, 1940….
-
Cystic Fibrosis Took Her Life. In Her Writing, She Left An Extraordinary Gift.
Mallory Smith’s memoir “Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life” may prove the most difficult book you’ll ever read. Because you know the ending. Smith was just three years old when she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a progressive lung disease for which there is no cure. A defective gene causes a buildup of mucus…
-
Oliver Sacks’s Partner On Readying The Author’s Final Book
Oliver Sacks was not a writer who mystified his process, writing quite a bit about how his work came together in books like “On the Move.” But what was it like to edit the neurologist and author? And how, now that he’s passed, did his collaborators put together a new book of his essays? Bill…
-
What’s An Ex-CIA Leader Doing On ‘Game Of Thrones’?
Last night’s “Game of Thrones,” the second installment of the hit HBO show’s six-episode final season, saw the ensemble awaiting a climactic siege on the northern holdfast of Winterfell. But little did the keepers of the castle know, as they planted bulwarks and fretted about tactics, that an expert on matters of national security was…
-
Jerome Charyn, The Half-Wild Novelist
Jerome Charyn lives in a well-preserved pocket of old New York. Within a block of his home on West 12th Street, near where the grid’s order gives way to angled avenues, is a park that dates back to the early 19th century; a grubby magazine stand; a handful of bodegas; a regularly-location-scouted luncheonette as seen…
-
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…
-
Susan Klebold Doesn’t Believe God Is Watching Over Her Family Anymore
In the days after Dylan Klebold along with Eric Harris shot and killed 12 students and one teacher and then himself at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, his mother, Sue Klebold, remembered a kind of “religious warfare” in the community of Littleton, Colorado. The notion that she hadn’t raised her son to be…
-
My Journey With The Szyk Haggadah
I first met Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) and discovered his Haggadah in 1975. In search of a gift for each member of my wedding party, I wandered into Bloch’s Judaica bookstore on Manhattan’s West Side and purchased several copies of the blue velvet-covered 1956 first Israeli edition of the Szyk Haggadah. Thus was kindled my intimate…
-
Theater Why The Edelweiss Is Not A Nazi Anthem
I won’t waste any time. “Edelweiss,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein song, penned for their 1959 musical “The Sound of Music,” that played at the White House before a press conference on the day the Mueller report was unsealed, is not a Nazi anthem. In the show and film, it’s sung in a moment of defiance…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Rep. Max Miller says driver called him a ‘dirty Jew’ and threatened to kill his family. A local doctor turned himself in.
- 2
News An Alabama millionaire offered Jews $50,000 to move to his town. 16 years later, what’s left?
- 3
Culture Why is Israel’s attack on Iran called ‘Rising Lion’ — and what does the Bible have to do with it?
- 4
News As Israel attacks, what is life like for Jews in Iran?
In Case You Missed It
-
Culture How a Jewish reporter like me got addicted to Christian media
-
Opinion Israeli leaders are using Holocaust comparisons to justify attacks on Iran. Is that kosher?
-
Fast Forward Over half of Jewish students at Columbia experienced discrimination and exclusion after Oct. 7, survey shows
-
Fast Forward Journalist board of Shtetl, news site covering haredi Orthodoxy, resigns after founder renounces mission
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
