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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How This Bible Got To Jerusalem — And Other Secrets Of Gershom Scholem’s Library
If you have ever wanted to visit the private library of a major intellectual, the place to be is Jerusalem, where Gershom Scholem’s personal library — along with the desk he wrote on — lives inside a room at the National Library of Israel. The space is homey, and feels a bit like a private…
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The Strange-But-True Story Of A Mossad-Run ‘Dive Resort’ In Muslim Sudan
It was one of the Mossad’s most daring, complex and longest-running operations. But only now, 37 years on, is the story of a Red Sea diving resort run by the agency getting its moment in the sun. “Operation Brothers,” which ran for over three years in the early 1980s, was a breathtaking mission. At its…
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Books Sami Rohr Prize Finalists Include Ilana Kurshan, Yair Mintzker
The finalists for the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, announced today, are Ilana Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink,” Sara Yael Hirschhorn’s “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement,” Shari Rabin’s “Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Yair Mintzker’s “The Many Deaths of Jew…
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Music John Zorn’s Done With His Masada Project. So, What’s Next?
In 1993, John Zorn began composing music based on Jewish themes for a new group, Masada Quartet. Now, 25 years and 613 tunes later, Zorn is closing the book — literally and figuratively — on what evolved into a sprawling, genre-defying series of hundreds of compositions written for dozens of different ensembles, all united by…
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The Art Of Losing Isn’t Hard To Master
The following essay is excerpted from Alberto Manguel’s “Packing My Library,” reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. Maybe loss is an inherited trait. My maternal grandmother had a gift for losing things. She had emigrated as a teenager from the outskirts of Ekaterinburg to one of Baron Hirsch’s colonies in the Argentinean Mesopotamia, and…
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On Joshua Harmon’s ‘Admission’ To An Argument
During the summer of 1973, the renowned civil rights attorney Joseph Rauh, Jr. delivered the featured speech at the annual fund-raising dinner of the Milwaukee Jewish Council. The audience, Rauh noted, surely expected him to address the burgeoning Watergate scandal, the attempt by Republican operatives tied to President Richard Nixon to break into Democratic National…
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Film & TV For Olivier Assayas, The Past Is Always Present
Olivier Assayas’s 1994 film “Cold Water” was a coming of age film in more ways than one. A teen romance set in the heady aftermath of Paris’s May ’68 uprising, the film showcases adolescent angst, romance, and the friction that accompanies the first encounters with something larger than oneself. For Assayas, it also represents, “The…
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Local News Can Be For The People Even If It’s Not By The People
I don’t know if Timothy Burke is going to save journalism, let alone democracy, but the spooky video he made for Deadspin at the end of March racked up 30 million views within a week and got the country gasping at Sinclair Broadcast Group’s fake anti-fake-news campaign. Burke, though, will need to pit what he…
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First Step To An All-Yiddish ‘Fiddler On The Roof’? Dance Auditions.
During the cherry-blossomed blush of the first proper week of spring, on the same day Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced which musicians would accompany 2018’s most hotly-anticipated nuptials, a group of men across the pond from Kensington Palace rehearsed for another famous wedding. “Hot toe! Hot toe! And heel,” choreographer Staš Kmieć yelled at…
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Want to Understand Putin’s Russia? Read “Dressed Up For A Riot.”
In response to the scandal surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election, American media outlets have presented the Kremlin as a breeding ground for complex schemes and ruthless espionage, and have cast Vladimir Putin as an eccentric mastermind. These commentators would do well to read Michael Idov’s “Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin’s Moscow,” a…
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Theater Are We Ready To Reckon With ‘The Merchant Of Venice’?
In May 1943, at Vienna’s Burg theater, the Nazi party staged its most famous production of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” It starred Werner Krauss, a man so anti-Semitic that he is said to have asked Joseph Goebbels to make a public announcement clarifying that he was not Jewish, but rather habitually played Jewish caricatures…
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