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
-
We’re Arguing About Concentration Camps — But What Does The Term Really Mean?
The use of the phrase “concentration camp” has caused a firestorm on Twitter — this time because New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on June 18 called detention centers at the U.S. border “concentration camps,” language that was swiftly criticized by Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney as demeaning the memory of the Holocaust. After Ocasio-Cortez said in…
-
8 Women Accuse Screenwriter Max Landis Of Sexual And Psychological Abuse
The following contains explicit accounts of sexual and psychological abuse Celebrity screenwriter Max Landis, writer of the films “Bright” and “Chronicle” and son of director John Landis, has been accused of physical and emotional abuse by eight women in a sweeping exposé published by The Daily Beast on June 18. Many of the women, some…
-
Anti-Semitism Allegations Prompt Penguin To Independent Inquiry Of Controversial Book
Days after defending a book deemed anti-Semitic by online critics, Penguin Random House announced an independent inquiry into its content led by Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger. The book, Colonel Pedro Baños’s “How They Rule Us,” came under scrutiny after the British author Jeremy Duns discovered that the volume originally contained a number of allusions to…
The Latest
-
Like Philip Roth, But Feminist: Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Debut Novel
On page 266 of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” I was filled with sadness, immediately and brutally, as if I had been injected with it. There is nothing particularly sad about page 266; the New York Times Magazine staff writer’s debut novel, while often funny, is pervasively sad, in an intimate, unavoidable way. But…
-
For Pauline Kael, Who Reinvented Film Criticism, On Her Hundredth Birthday
In a blistering essay in a 1980 edition of the New York Review Of Books, Renata Adler accused New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael of doing lasting damage to the critical enterprise. Critiquing Kael’s collection “When The Lights Go Down,” Adler wrote that the book revealed the pitfalls of the critic-in-residence post. By giving Kael…
-
Bob Dylan Musical ‘Girl From The North Country’ Set For Broadway Run
The music of Bob Dylan is coming to Broadway yet again — but not in the way one might expect. While previous efforts to plop Dylan’s music on the Great White Way include Twyla Tharp’s disastrous 2006 dance piece “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and Archibald MacLeish’s 1971 play, “Scratch,” for which the two poets…
-
How The War Against Sexual Harassment Was Won
Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment By Linda Hirshman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 316 pages, $27 It’s hard to write history while it’s happening. One pitfall is the problem of assessing just how powerful a movement or trend really is. To wit: Is the current #MeToo furor the harbinger of a social revolution?…
-
WATCH: The Musical Legacy Of Velvel Pasternak
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s no exaggeration to say that the renaissance of traditional Eastern-European Jewish music of the 1970s and 1980s would have never occurred without the work of the ethnomusicologist and musician Velvel Pasternak, who died on June 11th. The dozens of books of Jewish music released by his…
-
Director Of Berlin’s Jewish Museum Resigns After BDS Controversy
Peter Schäfer, the embattled director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum resigned on June 14 following fresh controversy surrounding his involvement in the boycott, divestment and sanctions dialogue, a source of growing contention in Germany. Schäfer, a former Princeton professor of Judaic Studies who is not Jewish, was questioned for his leadership in past months. But his…
-
My Bubbe, The Bull And The Kabbalah Of Catching A Foul Ball
It’s a weird thing to admit, perhaps, but my most vivid memory of my first major league baseball game involves foul balls. Sure, I still remember how awestruck I was by the hulking, battleship-like presence of Detroit’s old Tiger Stadium, and by how lush and lurid the green of the field appeared in contrast with…
-
Leonard Cohen’s Letters To His Muse Snagged $876,000 At Christie’s
Leonard Cohen’s letters, alongside other artifacts belonging to the late poet and songwriter’s one-time muse and lover Marianne Ihlen, have sold for $876,000 in an auction by Christies. Many of the items exceeded their initial asking prices. Among the auctioned items was a bronze bell that once adorned the wall of Cohen and Ihlen’s home…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Who was Horst Wessel, and why are people comparing Charlie Kirk to him?
- 2
Culture Charlie Kirk kept a ‘Jewish Sabbath.’ What did he mean by that?
- 3
Antisemitism Decoded Israel is being blamed for Charlie Kirk’s death. Here’s what that conspiracy theory says about the far right’s divide
- 4
Film & TV Robert Redford’s legacy is surprisingly Jewish
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion The terrifying Nazi precedent for Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — and the reasons to stay hopeful
-
Fast Forward Freed hostage Edan Alexander says he’s returning to the IDF next month
-
Yiddish World How a Yiddish acting troupe fooled the Tsarist government
-
Fast Forward After years of war, world’s oldest synagogue paintings are revealed as intact in Damascus
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
