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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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Wins Pulitzer For Tree Of Life Coverage
On April 15, the Pulitzer Prize announced its 2019 winners and finalists in the fields of journalism, literature and drama. Among the winners was the staff of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which was recognized in the category of Breaking News Reporting for coverage of the Tree of Life shooting. The Post-Gazette was lauded for reporting that…
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Art The Washington Post Condemns School District Apology Over ‘Jewish People’ Drawing
A month after a Virginia high school student’s drawing solicited concerns from community members who believed the artwork to be anti-Semitic, The Washington Post ran an editorial condemning the school district’s official response as “a groveling apology” with a “feeble reference to students’ First Amendment rights.” The editorial was titled “A High Schooler’s Controversial Artwork…
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Why Hank Greenberg Understood Jackie Robinson’s Struggles
Editor’s Note: In honor of Jackie Robinson Day, the Forward is revisiting this story about the relationship between Robinson and Detroit slugger Hank Greenberg. Anyone who has seen the film “42” would be horrified at the hostility Jackie Robinson faced from his teammates and opposing players and catcalling from the stands when he integrated Major…
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This Haggadah Is Different From All Other Haggadot
Faith and Freedom: Passover Haggadah with Commentary from the Writings of Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits edited by Dr. Reuven Mohl Urim Publications, 159 pages, $24.95 “What is Freedom?” is a good question for Seder night. A new Haggadah offers a surprising answer. “Faith and Freedom” — compiled by Reuven Mohl, a dentist (full disclosure: he’s my…
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When 250 Orthodox Jewish Immigrants Worked As Extras For Cecil B. DeMille
Among the thousands of extras Cecil B. DeMille hired for his original, silent version of “The Ten Commandments” were 250 Orthodox Jewish immigrants, newly arrived in Los Angeles from Eastern Europe The director hoped that they would lend a sense of human verisimilitude to the project: “We believed rightly that, both in appearance and in…
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The Secret Jewish History of Tax Day
Like it or not — and who among us actually likes it — come April 15, you will need to have filed your income tax return with the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps one way to feel better about the painful and often inconvenient process is to recognize that it has roots in the biblical concept…
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Novelist Joshua Furst On His Book ‘Revolutionaries,’ Abbie Hoffman And Countercultures
Rare is the Jew who doesn’t bring up his or her parents in a therapy session. As the tribe that created psychoanalysis, we may be predisposed to thinking our childhoods were messed up. But few Jews can claim they spent their early years waiting for the homecoming of their famous fugitive father or hanging around…
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Film & TV New York’s First Nelly Kaplan Retrospective Pays Tribute To A Fierce, Forgotten Filmmaker
Like the fierce women she committed to the screen, the young Nelly Kaplan was a risk-taker, unafraid to break barriers, or, for that matter, marriages. The Argentinian-born director arrived in France in 1953. She was 22, didn’t speak a word of French and had a meager $50 to her name, but within two years she…
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Adult Swim’s ‘Lazor Wulf’ Is A Show About A Laser Wolf, Not The ‘Fiddler’ Butcher, Lazar Wolf
Lazar Wolf is a creation of the great Yiddish fiction writer Sholem Aleichem. He is Anatevka’s village butcher. In “Fiddler on the Roof,” the 1964 musical treatment of Aleichem’s Tevye the Milk Man stories, Wolf is best remembered for being a wealthy older suitor to Tevye’s daughter Tzeitel. He doesn’t end up marrying her (Motel…
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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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Two Forward Writers Nominated For 2019 Deadline Club Awards
Two writers from the Forward are finalists for awards from the Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Club announced Monday. Deputy Culture Editor Talya Zax was one of three journalists nominated in the category of Arts Reporting for her December 2018 cover story, “Men Explain Anne Frank…
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