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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In ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock,’ Jewish And Other Mysteries
“I know when there’s girls together there is trouble,” says Reg Lumley, a side character in the new Amazon miniseries “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” The series is based loosely on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, and was also adapted by Peter Weir in his landmark 1975 film. The six-part television interpretation depicts girls and women living…
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Meet 3 Men On The Front Lines Of The Immigration Crisis
On a typical weekday, Rabbi Jonathan Klein can often be found marching alongside ministers, monsignors and janitors. Irv Hershenbaum could be pressuring multimillion-dollar almond growers to provide their workers with shade to protect them from the blazing California sun. And “Rabbi Dr.” Aryeh Cohen might well be phoning his Talmud students to let them know…
The Latest
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My Father’s Day Regrets
The fellow who came up with the idea of Father’s Day was probably some poor haberdasher hoping to prompt children to buy ties and shirts, if you want to be cynical about it, but also, one hopes, wanting to allow those children to express their appreciation for their Dads. For many of us, however, particularly…
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June 10: Chicago: The Greater Chicago Jewish Festival
Become immersed in a day of Jewish culture at the Greater Chicago Jewish Festival on Sunday, June 10. From 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the St. Paul Woods, Cook County Forest Preserve, there will be live music (on four stages, featuring the likes of Corky Siegel, Howard Levy and RebbeSoul), comedy (think improv with…
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Philip Roth And The Yiddish Tradition
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the course of their ongoing debate, the literary critic Irving Howe used to complain that Philip Roth’s writing suffered from a weak connection to the Jewish tradition and that he was a writer with a “thin personal culture.” What strikes us more than 40 years later,…
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What The Ayatollah Means By ‘Eradicating’ Israel
Let me begin by thanking Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei of Iran and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly for the opportunity to investigate the word “eradicate.” I never thought I’d have the chance to express gratitude to Khamenei and Goldberg in the same sentence, but these are strange times. When the President of the United…
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Bruce Lee Was Jewish?
Was Bruce Lee really Jewish? The new Bruce Lee biography, “Bruce Lee: A Life”, comes with a few surprising revelations. Written by Matthew Polly and published on June 5, 2018 by Simon & Schuster “Bruce Lee: A Life” is the monumental new biography of the martial arts film star and cultural icon. Brice Lee was…
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Ilana Kurshan Wins Sami Rohr Prize For ‘If All The Seas Were Ink’
Ilana Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir” has won the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. “If All the Seas Were Ink” recounts the years in which Kurshan, recovering from the dissolution of her first marriage at age 27, undertook the project of reading the entire Talmud, one page per day….
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Atticus Finch, Harper Lee’s Father And The Jewish Settler Movement
One day in September 1933, shortly after having been bailed out of jail, a middle-aged, partially paralyzed black man named Dennis Cross answered a knock at his front door in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His visitors, pretending to be police officers, were in fact white civilians, and they were incensed that Cross had been accused of sexually…
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How Alison Klayman’s Jewish Education Prepared Her To Confront Adderall
Alison Klayman, a graduate of a Jewish day school with a history degree from Brown, is no stranger to the documentary world: Her film “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” (2012), which followed the Chinese artist and activist, received a special jury prize that year at Sundance and opened Tel Aviv’s 2012 Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival….
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Did Michael Pollan Kill God?
Michael Pollan had enlightenment envy. Unlike most patients in clinical trials of psilocybin, when Pollan ate a magic mushroom, he wasn’t terrified by a terminal illness, he wasn’t suffering from alcoholism or depression and he hadn’t been diagnosed with a personality disorder. But he “envied the radical new perspectives” of the people in psychedelic therapy…
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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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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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