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 Female Nude Is Triter Than Ever — Just Look at Anselm Kiefer
Much of German artist Anselm Kiefer’s work can be captured (to the extent that art can ever be described with total accuracy) in a single word: ruin. Kiefer, born in southwest Germany in 1945 just two months before the end of World War II, has dedicated a large portion of his oeuvre to reckoning with…
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How The Yom Kippur War Started American Trucker Culture — And Mannheim Steamroller
When I was growing up in Colorado, my father and I would regularly drive by a truck stop slightly north of Denver called Deno’s 6 & 85. We always talked about stopping in, although we never did. With 70s-era bright neon signs advertising steak and cocktails, the roadside restaurant seemed like a home for frank,…
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Books Israel’s City of the Future: Portrait of a Smug Society
Excerpted from the book “No Country for Jewish Liberals.” This is a political and personal story about Israel, about how over the years it went one way and I went the other. I’m going to start where I live, literally—in the city (actually the sprawling suburban bedroom community) of Modi’in, which is truly a showcase…
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Tony Kushner Is ‘Wildly Alarmed’ But Still Hopeful
Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of the two-part play “Angels in America,” has never been an advocate of absolute pessimism. Written in the height of the AIDS crisis, “Angels in America” confronted the disease’s physical and social ravages — and the heartless, cruel unresponsiveness of the American government — with a transcendent grace, if…
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Madeleine Albright, On Her 80th Birthday, Is Still Unstoppable
Former Secretary of State and current badass Madeleine Albright turns 80 on May 15, 2017. Here are 8 things about her worth celebrating: 1) Her incredible career Albright wasn’t just the first female Secretary of State. She’s been a professor of International Relations at Georgetown University for decades, served as an Ambassador to the United…
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Jewish Writers Star At New American Writers Museum
Ann Landers and Susan Sontag. Allen Ginsberg and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gertrude Stein and Shel Silverstein. And a pioneering journalist named Ab Cahan. When the American Writers Museum opens on the second floor of a Chicago office building this week, Jewish visitors will find themselves well-represented. Jewish names loom large here, from a “Visionaries and…
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Even Now, My Jewish Mother Still Brings Me Home
Broke and broken at 31, I fled to the Czech Republic, where I taught English during the day and did theater at night. I was trying to recover from sexual violation and from the circumstances of my life: hateful day jobs and bad boyfriends in ponytails. It was no coincidence I was 5,000 miles away…
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Israeli Star Of James Bond Spoofs Dies At 74
In 1967, Daliah Lavi did what a number of women have likely dreamed of doing since: She poisoned Woody Allen. Well, not quite. Starring opposite him in the 1967 James Bond spoof “Casino Royale,” she tricked him into swallowing an atomic pill that turned him into a human nuclear bomb — the science on this…
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Why These Cutesy Putin Articles Must Stop
Footage of Vladimir Putin playing the piano prior to his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping has recently been making its way across the internet. He sits down, haltingly taps out a couple sentimental Russian tunes, smirks at the camera, and then we’re off. An article in the Huffington Post reads, “The Russian leader isn’t…
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What Do The Talmud And Torah Really Say About Trump’s Lies?
We are living in an age when world leaders regularly deny historical facts — and therefore, defining what the word “lie” means is an urgent concern. It’s also an ancient concern. Both the Torah and the Talmud seem a bit clairvoyant these days in their interest in delineating what a lie is, when it’s okay…
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Why Did Lillian Hellman Get Sick Of ‘The Little Foxes’?
‘I like ‘Little Foxes,’ but I’m tired of it,” the playwright Lillian Hellman told The Paris Review in 1965. She might think differently were she to see the current Broadway revival of her best-known play, starring Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon. Why might that production catch Hellman’s eye? Those actors alternate with each other in…
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Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
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Music ‘No matter what, I will always be a Jew.’ Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history
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Culture She was my Hebrew school bully — and I finally learned what happened to her
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Opinion American Jews were played — now what?
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