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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Theater Jason Alexander lives out a lifelong dream, playing Tevye in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
'I wanted to do a piece that is proudly Semitic' said the Tony winner and ‘Seinfeld' star
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How Jewish Rights Became Human Rights
Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century By James Loeffler Yale University Press, 384 pages, $32.50 Following Winston Churchill’s prediction in 1942 that the war against fascism would “end with the enthronement of human rights,” the phrase, which had rarely been used in the discourse of international law, began to gain currency….
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Film & TV A Most Unnatural Experiment With Nature And Nurture
“It’s a lot darker than a Disney movie,” Paula Bernstein says to a chirpy talk show host who has just compared the magical coincidences of her separated-at-birth story to a fantasy from the wonderful world of Uncle Walt. The host is gobsmacked by the facts that Paula and her identical twin sister Elyse Schein both…
The Latest
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‘Maus’ Creator Art Spiegelman Becomes First Comics Artist To Win Prestigious Culture Award
(JTA) — Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novelist for “Maus,” is set to become the first cartoonist to win the prestigious MacDowell Medal for culture and the arts. The recognition puts Spiegelman, the son of Polish Holocaust survivors, in the company of cultural icons such as painter Georgia O’Keeffe and surrealist filmmaker David Lynch. “Maus,”…
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Alissa Quart On Crusading Jewishly For Social Justice
What happens when the bottom falls out of the middle class? That’s the wrenching, relevant question at the heart of “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,” Alissa Quart’s eloquent and passionate dispatch from what she deems the struggling “Middle Precariat.” In deeply etched portraits of struggling professionals, Quart evokes how soaring costs and hostile…
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Art Israeli Illusionist Uri Geller Finds A 19th-Century Soap Factory Where He’s Building His Museum
Sometimes when you build a museum, the past finds you. A few weeks ago Uri Geller, the Israeli illusionist who made his name in the 1970s by using his mind to bend spoons on television, sensed something beneath the debris at the building site of his forthcoming museum, the Uri Geller Museum in Jaffa, Haaretz…
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Nazi Symbols In Video Games? For First Time, Germany Says Yes.
Since a 1998 censorship ruling on video games, German gamers have played World War II-themed titles like “Call of Duty” without a swastika in sight. That may soon change. The Telegraph reports that the German video games industry body in charge of regulating content, the Entertainment Software Self-Regulation Body — known as the USK —…
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How Yiddish Education Got Its Start In America, From Zionism To Socialism
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Are Jews a people or a religious community? This reductive question has been debated for more than two centuries, since the time of the Jewish Enlightenment. Its stakes are particularly high with regard to Jewish education. Religious subjects have an old and fixed place in the Jewish…
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Music The Secret Jewish History Of Aretha Franklin
To understand the close ties between the singer Aretha Franklin, who has died at the age of 76, and Jewish musicians, writers, and performers, one need not have seen the 1982 TV special starring Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen) in which the comedian who famously got no respect feigns singing backup on Franklin’s 1967 recording…
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This Was The End Of Francois Truffaut’s Innocence
Even if he hadn’t started his career with “The 400 Blows,” one of cinema’s defining studies of childhood, Francois Truffaut would have a reputation as a particularly youthful filmmaker. His style is marked by its verve, as summed up by the director’s maxim, “four ideas for every one minute,” and the particular livewire energy of…
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Jewish Montreal Is More Than Just Leonard Cohen And Bagels
Leonard Cohen. Mordecai Richler. Bagels. To the outside world, Jewish Montreal’s achievements often get reduced to sound bites and caricatures. But as a new exhibition at downtown Montreal’s McCord Museum makes clear, Jews have had a hand in nearly every aspect of civic, social, cultural and business life in Canada’s second-largest city. Even the organizers…
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Britain Just Returned Iraqi Artifacts. What Does That Mean For The Jewish Archive?
The eight artifacts were found in London in 2003, the same year in which Iraq’s National Museum was looted in the wake of the American invasion. Between 2,000 and 5,000 years old, the sacred objects — which include clay cones inscribed with cuneiform script, a shard of a ceremonial weapon and a marble pendant —…
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