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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100 years after its founding, can a Yiddish institute serve a people who don’t speak the language?
YIVO’s centennial marks a fractious time in Jewish life. It’s ready for the challenge.
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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…
The Latest
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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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America’s Jewish Women — From RG (Rebecca Gratz) To RBG
America’s Jewish Women: A History From Colonial Times to Today By Pamela S. Nadell W.W. Norton & Company, 336 pages, $28.95 In her swift-paced and concise history of American Jewish women, Pamela S. Nadell name checks all the usual suspects, from the Philadelphia philanthropist Rebecca Gratz and the poet Emma Lazarus to Betty Friedan and…
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Film & TV 30 Years Ago, A Fatwa Against Salman Rushdie Shook The World — And Inspired Larry David
In 2007, on the occasion of his first day teaching literature at Emory University, Salman Rushdie told reporters he receives a “sort of Valentine’s Day card” from the Iranian government each year reminding him the country hasn’t forgotten the bounty it placed on his head in 1989. Today marks the 30th anniversary of Iranian cleric…
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The USSR Turned Against The Jews. But First, It Was A Yiddish Intellectual Haven.
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s not every day that a manuscript gets discovered in an attic, let alone a complete book written by a distinguished Yiddish author. Well, in the world of Yiddish, where even published books are often relegated to synagogue basements, occasions like these are not entirely unusual. Nonetheless,…
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How A Yiddish Song Yearning For Moldova Became An Anthem For Jewish Immigrants Everywhere
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. With immigration from Europe largely cut off in 1924 and visits to the old country prohibitively expensive for most, a wave of nostalgia for Eastern Europe spread among Yiddish-speaking Jews in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. One result of this longing was the creation…
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The Secret Jewish History Of ‘Russian Doll’
Netflix’s “Russian Doll” is a Rorschach of a show. The early press has been hot with takes crowing that the dark and funny series is inseparable from star and co-creator Natasha Lyonne’s history of addiction and AA’s signature 12 steps. Others have posited that the constant respawning of the game-programmer protagonist in the same location,…
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April 2: Massachusetts: Forward Updates With CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
Join Forward CEO and Publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen in West Springfield, Massachusetts, as she is interviewed by writer and fundraising adviser Lou Cove about the changes at the Forward. At the closed event at PJ Library, Rachel will speak to a group of Jewish Federation and JCC leadership from across the United States and Canada….
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News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
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Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
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Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
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Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward Naftali Bennett is back: Former Israeli prime minister will make another run at Netanyahu
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Fast Forward Citing post-Holocaust doctrine, Germany seeks to deport 4 pro-Palestinian protesters, including one American
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Fast Forward Trump administration freezes research funding to Princeton amid antisemitism investigations
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Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
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