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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The 27 Poems You Have To Read For National Poetry Month
“In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode,” wrote Adrienne Rich in her 1993 essay “Someone is Writing a Poem.” Later, in the same essay, she tried to explain just how: “In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones…
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This Man Destroyed The Myth Of Biblical Time
During the documentary “Bill Nye: Science Guy,” America’s favorite science communicator traveled to rural Grant County, Kentucky, to visit Ark Encounter, a Christian evangelical theme park. Its main attraction is a massive, 510-foot-long, wooden “reconstruction” of Noah’s Ark, which towers over the site’s parking lot. Inside the ark, tourists can take their picture with some…
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A Holocaust Museum Tells The Untellable Story — Through Orthodox Eyes
NEW YORK (JTA) — Like Holocaust museums the world over, the Amud Aish Memorial Museum in Brooklyn focuses on European Jewish communities that thrived before the Nazis came to power, the killing machine that led to millions of deaths, and the resilience of survivors both during the war and in rebuilding their Jewish lives in…
The Latest
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How Fight Over African Immigrants Is (Literally) Dividing Houses In Israel
The refugee crisis in Israel is personal for many Israelis. In South Tel Aviv’s Shapira neighborhood, where most residents have modest incomes, one house has two signs — half the house calls for letting refugees stay; the other calls for sending them out of Israel. One sign reads: “South Tel Aviv Is Against the Expulsion.”…
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Film & TV A Film About The Blight Of Anti-Semitism Dominated Austria’s Box Office — In 1924
In the end, the Jews come back. They’re warmly dressed, smiling, clean and apparently none the worse for wear. It’s a convivial scene, a meeting between men who misunderstood each other but never meant harm. Two young girls in light-colored dresses present flowers, in recognition and appreciation: We’re so glad you’re here. The end of…
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Film & TV What Movies Do You Need To Watch To Understand America?
What movies make essential viewing for someone seeking to understand the United States? Ask Martin Scorsese, and he might say — as he did, per a Film Journal International report, at a recent panel discussion in New York — that movies that meet the criteria “look squarely at the struggles, violent disagreements and the tragedies…
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Sadly, The Ku Klux Klan Was A Lot More Mainstream Than You Think
Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s By Felix Harcourt University of Chicago Press, 272 Pages, $45 The “alt-right” is alarming, partly because it is youthful. American conservatism often presents itself stodgily: middle-aged men wearing bow ties or affecting English accents; clean-shaven pastors (also men) delivering clean, safe sermons; stiff, suited military…
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Did Simon & Garfunkel Write The Jewish ‘Sgt. Pepper?’
In the late spring of 1967, the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” hit the world like a paisley paint bomb. Its psychedelic splatters were especially evident in England, where pop artists of all stripes immediately seized upon the album’s heady mixture of lysergic wonder and Victorian nostalgia as a new…
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We Were More Than Just Slaves In Egypt
Somewhere between the charoset and the matzo ball soup, the Passover Hagaddah makes a somewhat strange request: “In each generation, every person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally came forth from Egypt.” It’s not enough to merely remember that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt. We need to connect with that memory…
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Superman May Tell A Jewish Story — But It’s Not The One You’d Expect
Is Superman Jewish? Superman, the superhero who defends Metropolis and masquerades by day as the journalist Clark Kent, was born on Krypton. But he immigrates to Earth, just as many Jewish-Americans left their homes to come to the United States. Superman’s adoptive parents, the Kents, find him in a spaceship far from home — just…
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How Ruth Bader Ginsburg Became RBG
During his eight years in the White House, President Bill Clinton appointed more Jews to high-level administration positions than had any other president. Of special historic significance, Clinton was the first president to appoint two Jews to the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. The first court vacancy came within six weeks…
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