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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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
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Carl Reiner On Judaism, Atheism And The ‘Monster’ In The White House
At 96, Carl Reiner still slays. The comedy deity, who is being honored this week at the Westchester Jewish Film Festival, has maintained his singular outlook — melding the clear-eyed and cockeyed, the everyday and absurd. Busier than most people half his age, Reiner’s prolific on Twitter, where the current occupant of the White House…
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What The New Left Could Learn From The Old Left
Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics by Michael Walzer NYRB Classics, 120 pages, $14.95 Michael Walzer’s “Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics,” published in 1971 and newly reissued by NYRB Classics, may be the least exciting book ever written about taking to the streets. I don’t mean that as an insult,…
The Latest
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How The Jewish Left Evolved On Zionism
The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left From Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky By Susie Linfield Yale University Press, 400 pages, $32.50 In 1981, in an essay titled “Revolutionary Realism and the Struggle for Palestine,” Fred Halliday, a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review, broke with his comrades. A scholar of…
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Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Eight: Amy Levy
“This poem — surely a most remarkable one to be produced by a girl still at school — is distinguished, as nearly all Miss Levy’s work is, by the qualities of sincerity, directness, and melancholy.” That was Oscar Wilde on Amy Levy’s poem “Xantippe,” a 30-page imagined narration by Socrates’ wife. Levy originally published the…
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Is This High School Student’s Drawing Anti-Semitic Or Progressive?
An artwork displayed last week at Northern Virginia Community College’s Ernst Community Cultural Center in Annandale, Virginia drew condemnation from a local rabbi for anti-Semitism. The picture, which has since been removed, was drawn by a 17-year-old high school student and depicts a squint-eyed man with a hooknose, sidelocks and kippah standing near a well…
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The Secret Jewish History Of Baseball’s Opening Day
Like a New Year celebration, Major League Baseball’s annual opening day brings with it an opportunity to start afresh: to leave the past behind and to begin anew with a clean slate. Every team begins the new season as a reborn entity: The reigning World Champions and last year’s losers are equal going into the…
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Music Judge Dismisses All But One Of James Levine’s Defamation Claims In Met Case
It’s been a year since the Metropolitan Opera fired conductor James Levine, its longtime music director, following allegations of sexual abuse. In short order, Levine sued the Met for breach of contract and defamation. On Tuesday, March 26, Justice Andrea Masley of the New York State Supreme Court moved to dismiss all but one of…
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‘WALL’ Falls Too Much To One Side
“A country has reached a point at which 84% of its people are in favor of a wall along its borders,” writer David Hare tells us in the opening minutes of the 2017 animated film, “WALL,” which begins a week-long run at New York’s Film Forum April 3-9 as part of the theater’s admission-free week….
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From Alex Weiser, A New Musical Home For Yiddish
Composer Alex Weiser’s debut album “and all the days were purple” will be released by Cantaloupe Music on April 12th, with a release concert at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on April 9th. The music, which finds inspiration from secular Jewish poetry in Yiddish and English, chronicles a search for the divine while reflecting…
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Who To Read for Women’s History Month, Part Seven: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
“If it hadn’t been for Yasi!” Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote in “The Judge’s Will,” a short story she published in The New Yorker shortly before her death in 2013. “He was born in Delhi and in this house — a gloomy, inward-looking family property, built in the nineteen-twenties and crowded with heavy Indo-Victorian furniture inherited…
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Art As Sacklers Settle Opioid Lawsuit, Museums Cut Philanthropic Ties
Last week, in a sea change for the world of art philanthropy, three major museums decided to reject donations from the Sackler family. The museums, which announced their decisions over the course of three days, are the London-based National Portrait Gallery and Tate galleries and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Yesterday, the…
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Fast Forward Rep. Max Miller says driver called him a ‘dirty Jew’ and threatened to kill his family. A local doctor turned himself in.
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News As Israel attacks, what is life like for Jews in Iran?
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Culture Why is Israel’s attack on Iran called ‘Rising Lion’ — and what does the Bible have to do with it?
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