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
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Theater Is Orpheus And Eurydice A Myth About Political Power? In ‘Hadestown,’ Absolutely.
Editor’s note: On April 30 ‘Hadestown’ was nominated for 14 Tony Awards, the highest number of any eligible Broadway show. Orpheus and Eurydice: You know the story. They fall in love, Eurydice dies, and Orpheus, a musician of astonishing talent, follows her to the underworld, hoping to rescue her. His music so moves Hades, god…
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Le Corbusier — Revolutionary Architect, Nazi Apologist
“I am quite simple, even transparent. It’s the events swirling around me that are twisted.” When he wrote these words late in life to a friend, the world-renowned architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, seemed to anticipate the controversies that his revolutionary ideas and crowded life would eventually inspire. In light of a…
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How To Talk To Your Four Sons About The Mueller Report
On April 18, Attorney General William Barr will make public a redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Trump campaign and administration. The report, a record of a wide-ranging probe launched nearly two years ago, is said to be nearly 400 pages long and to offer insights into the president’s ties to…
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Should We Be Colorizing Photographs From Auschwitz?
In the photograph, an adolescent girl wearing an oversized blue prison uniform stares emptily at the camera. Her tawny hair is cropped short; her face is gaunt. Her bottom lip is swollen, marked by a sliver of red blood. Like many, I first saw the photograph of Czesława Kwoka, a Polish teenager who was killed…
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Swiss Court Rules Unpublished Kafka Papers Transferred To Israel
Contemporary audiences nearly missed the chance to read most of Franz Kafka’s work. When the writer died in 1924 at the age of 40, he entrusted his manuscripts to his friend Max Brod under the condition that he burn them. The fact that we still abuse the adjective “Kafkaesque,” is proof that these terms weren’t…
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