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
-
Art
Director of Holocaust Museum Fears Its Lessons Are Timeless
Sara Bloomfield joined the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in its early stages, years before the project turned into one of the nation’s most visited landmarks on the National Mall in Washington. Now, after serving as director of the museum for 18 years, Bloomfield, 67, is tasked with leading the institution during a time when…
-
Why We’re Living Inside The Worst Movie Ever Made
Maybe the most salient characteristic of our culture is how much of it is bad. Technological changes have allowed an unprecedented number of hacks to produce great quantities of what the parlance of the day terms “content.” At the same time, the presumed existence of a consumer with a bottomless appetite for diversion has encouraged…
-
The Word ‘Hanukkah’ Means A Lot More Than You Think It Does
What does the word “Hanukkah” mean? For children, it often means the holiday of presents. For Tel Aviv doughnut obsessives, it means congregating on all eight days at bakeries with the most elaborate sufganiyot. For many around the world, it’s “the Festival of Lights,” when seeing menorahs in the windows of neighbors’ homes illuminates the…
The Latest
-
Italy Tells The Story Of Its Jewish People In New Museum
“The story of Jews in Italy is really an Italian story,” Dario Disegni said one recent autumn morning at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies. Disegni, president of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, was appearing at Columbia to discuss the museum, which is also known as MEIS, opens in Ferrara…
-
Why Are So Many Jewish Podcasts So Bad — And What Can We Do About It?
Podcasting, you may have heard, is booming. Listenership is up, so is awareness of the medium, and high-quality podcasts seem to be popping up everywhere. As with television, the medium itself has recently become more respectable, including among the Hollywood A-listers; Oscar Isaac stars in “Homecoming,” while an episode of “Reply All” is being adapted…
-
That Time Two Jewish Con Artists Got Way More Than They Bargained For
During the early twentieth century, the New York–based socialist daily, Forverts, the progenitor of the very Forward you are currently reading, was the largest and most successful Yiddish newspaper in the world. Among the local, national, and international news, editorial, literary, and entertainment pieces it printed, the Forverts also commissioned original reporting on all manner…
-
Music The Secret Jewish History of ‘You’re Sixteen,’ That Song Joel Pollak Was Yammering About
The old rockabilly standard “You’re Sixteen,” first made famous by Johnny Burnette in 1960 and then revived by Ringo Starr in 1973, is back in the news again after right-wing commentator Joel Pollak, of Breitbart News, referred to the pop hit in defense of Alabama Republican Senatorial candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of…
-
Lilli Hornig Fled Hitler And Helped Develop Atomic Weapons — Then Fought Against Their Use
Lilli Hornig, the Czech-born Jewish chemist who died on November 17 at age 96, showed an exemplary interest in what in the “Pirkei Avot” a book of the Mishnah, is termed g’milut chasadim, or acts of loving kindness. Hornig’s family, many of whom were scientists, fled their homeland in the early 1930s after her father…
-
Movie News: ‘Call Me By Your Name,’ Barbra Streisand And Sacha Baron Cohen
In my family, movies are an essential part of Thanksgiving: Most years, my cousins in Chicago and I will go see a blockbuster on Thanksgiving morning, returning just late enough to be met by parental panic over making sure things are done on time. (Yes, we also help out.) This year I’m staying in New…
-
Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster Make New York Times List Of 2017’s Best Books
Novels by Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster and David Grossman are among the 100 books named to The New York Times’s 2017 list of the year’s 100 most notable books. Krauss’s “Forest Dark,” Auster’s “4 3 2 1” and Grossman’s “A Horse Walks Into a Bar,” which won this year’s Man Booker International Prize, won commendations…
-
Film & TV Michael Showalter, Known For His Comedy, Discusses The Seriously Dark ‘Search Party’
Best known for the zany TV comedies “The State” and “Stella” and feel-good films “Wet Hot American Summer” and “The Big Sick,” Michael Showalter might not be the person you’d expect to find behind an ambitious new noir. Yet as producer of the TBS comedy “Search Party,” the second season of which premiered on Sunday,…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Music How a swaggering Jewish kid from East London became (albeit briefly) Britain’s greatest rock star and poet
- 2
News That whites-only, no Jews allowed Arkansas community is legal, says state’s attorney general. How?
- 3
Opinion As an Israeli political scientist, I resisted thinking this war was a genocide. Here’s what changed my mind
- 4
News In a first, Orthodox rabbinical school ordains an out gay rabbi
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Rabbi and family safely escape fire at historic New Jersey synagogue
-
Culture On a tour of Hasidic Brooklyn, this rabbi doesn’t have all the answers — but he knows who does
-
Opinion Which school of philosophy provides the best guide for how to think about Gaza?
-
Culture Everything’s terrible — but at least there are Moomins
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
