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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Chaim Soutine Was Obsessed With Dead Animals. In Painting Them, He Acutely Captured Life.
There is a well-known send-up, in the movie “Notting Hill,” of self-righteous dietary fads. “I’m a fruitarian,” a mousy young woman announces on a first date with Hugh Grant. “We believe that fruits and vegetables have feelings,” she says; with a sniff, she confirms that the carrots at dinner were murdered. Anyone who has laughed…
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When Blacks and Jews Joined Forces To Defeat The KKK
“I hate ni—ers, Jews, Mexicans, spics, chinks, and anyone else that does not have pure white Aryan blood in their veins,” the African-American actor John David Washington (son of Denzel) barks into the telephone receiver, leaning back in his office chair during a key scene in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman,” which recently won the Grand Prix,…
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Why Kurt Waldheim’s Election Still Matters
Ruth Beckermann is sick of people telling her that her films are timely. “It’s really boring,” says the Austrian director who has been digging into the dark corners on her country’s history since “The Paper Bridge,” which screened at the 1987 Berlin Film Festival. But with a far right political party leading Austria for the…
The Latest
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‘Some Like It Hot’ Adaptation Will Hit Broadway — But Can Anything Top The Movie?
60 years after the original film’s premiere, “Some Like it Hot” — the legendary Billy Wilder-directed comedy about two musicians who dress in drag and join an all-female band led by Marilyn Monroe to escape the mob — will come to Broadway. According to The New York Times’s Michael Paulson, producers Craig Nadan and Neil…
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That Time Tom Wolfe Lampooned Leonard Bernstein And ‘Radical Chic’
The satiric novelist and essayist Tom Wolfe died on May 14 at age 88 in the midst of world-wide celebrations for the centenary of Leonard Bernstein. This timing might have appealed to Wolfe’s well-developed sense of irony, since he authored “Radical Chic,” a savage takedown of Bernstein first published in June 1970 by New York…
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From That White Suit To That Feud With Chomsky: Reflections On Tom Wolfe
The writer Tom Wolfe, one of the pioneers of the literary movement known as the New Journalism — alongside the likes of Joan Didion, Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin — passed away on Monday at age 88. Wolfe, who was notably verbose and only slightly less notably eager to get into scraps with his peers,…
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Q & A: Joel Meyerowitz On Being The First Person To Photograph Ground Zero
Joel Meyerowitz grew up in the East Bronx, and rose to prominence as a New York street photographer. Now, he lives in Tuscany, foraging flea markets for odd objects and arranging them in striking ways to create evocative still life photographs. In a new retrospective book on his work, “Where I Find Myself” — which is…
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Is Michael Chabon’s New Book Really A Book?
Pops: Fatherhood In Pieces By Michael Chabon HarperCollins, 144 pages, $19.99 “You can write great books,” a writer, a “great man,” once told Michael Chabon at a party on the Truckee River, “or you can have kids. It’s up to you.” That’s an interesting sentiment, though I found myself wondering who this “great man” was….
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The Secret Jewish History Of Sports Gambling
The Supreme Court has overturned a federal ban on state-authorized gambling on sporting events, thus reopening the door to a profession that has long boasted its fair share of Jewish participants, some legendary in the field. The likes of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, of course, were instrumental in organizing gambling on a host of…
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Why Do We Keep Honoring This Unrepentant Anti-Semite?
A new book from St. Martin’s Press by Susan Ronald, biographer of Adolf Hitler’s art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, details how Florence Gould (1895-1983 a society hostess born in America of French parents, was an egregious collaborator during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. Yet today, New Yorkers flock to the Florence Gould Hall at the French…
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Ruchie Freier: Hasidic Judge, American Trailblazer
Judge Rachel (“Ruchie”) Freier, 52, is the only Hasidic woman judge in the world. She knows she’s an anomaly, and yet she sees nothing contradictory between her deeply held religious beliefs and her high-powered, secular career. “People always make a big deal that I’m the first Hasidic woman judge, but my husband [mortgage broker David…
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Culture Mamdani’s first statement on antisemitism as mayor-elect got some weird pushback
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Culture How one man’s burial brought Jews and Christians together — and what it still teaches 120 years later
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