Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
-
Film & TV 8 young Jewish comedians on what ‘SNL 50’ means to them
'Saturday Night Live' may be entering middle age, but these rising Jewish comics are just getting started.
-
The 14 New Books You Should Be Reading This Fall
Cooler mornings; stray, amber-tinged leaves drifting romantically toward the sidewalk; a host of newspaper cartoons mocking an imminent flood of pumpkin-spiced baked goods and beverages — it must be fall! Call us biased, but we’ve always felt that the best way to celebrate autumn’s coziness is to curl up with a good book. Luckily, some…
-
This Stunning Australian Story Rivals Philip Roth
The Golden Age By Joan London Europa Editions, 256 pages, $17 Where has Joan London been all my life? In Perth, Australia, apparently, at the outer edge of the earth, and completely off my radar. Which is a shame, because her third novel, “The Golden Age” — which takes its name from a pub-turned-convalescent home…
The Latest
-
Will Broadway Water Down Ben Hecht’s Venomous ‘Front Page’?
A Broadway revival of the joyously raucous, racy comedy “The Front Page”, about 1920s Chicago newspaper world high jinks, began previews September 20. Written by the American Jewish screenwriter and novelist Ben Hecht (1894–1964) and Charles MacArthur, both former Chicago crime reporters, the play’s gallows humor mocks Jews, African Americans, gay men and lesbians, and…
-
A Year After His Death, Theodore Bikel Continues To Defy Typecasting
It’s been just a little over a year since Theodore Bikel died — he passed away a year ago July at age 91 — and as such, his legacy has yet to be cemented. This is undoubtedly due in part to the difficulty of encapsulating the legacy of a veritable Zelig – an Austrian-born Zionist…
-
What Elie Wiesel Taught Me About Being a Writer
It was only a few weeks into my first semester of graduate school that things began to go awry. The M.A. Creative Writing workshop that autumn was led by a writer I admired; my fellow students were savvy and talented, energetic in their critiques of each other’s manuscripts. I’d just returned from a stint working…
-
Is New York Times Critic Comparing Trump to Hitler?
Sometimes, when New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani is channeling the voice of Holden Caulfield or over-using the word limn, she can be a tad grating. Other times, though, she still has the capacity to knock one out of the park. That’s the case today with Kakutani’s already-gone-viral review of “Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939,” which uses…
-
Is a Jewish Accent Still a Thing — And If So, What Is It?
Over at Atlas Obscura, writer Dan Nosowitz poses a question that all of us have probably thought about at one time or another — Is there such a thing as a Jewish accent? And if so, what is it? And if we can define what it is, is it still a thing? Nosowitz’s answer to…
-
Why Westworld Is a 21st Century Golem Story
Adam, the first man, was, like Shakespeare’s MacDuff, not of woman born. But neither was he, from his mother’s womb, untimely ripped. He was created from dust, making him (according to the Talmud) the first golem. Probably not true, but significant. An origin story. Many golem stories followed. In the most famous ones, the golem…
-
Rachel Weisz Has a Thing or Two To Say About ‘Denial’
The British actress Rachel Weisz plays historian Deborah Lipstadt in the new film “Denial.” The film resonates with the actress’s own life: Weisz’s father is Jewish; her mother became a Jew, and both fled the Nazis. Weisz met with the Forward’s Jane Eisner recently to talk about the film, her visit to Auschwitz and what…
-
How Our Legal Team Won the Case Against Holocaust Denial
The libel case brought against Deborah Lipstadt in London by the Holocaust denier David Irving came to trial in 2000. I was one of Lipstadt’s attorneys, and 2000 feels like longer than 16 years ago. A world pre-9/11, before the ubiquity of social media and, for Jews, predating the emergence of much debated new forms…
-
Bruce Springsteen’s Jewish Neighbors — and Other Highlights of The Boss’s Autobiography
The first time Jews Bruce Springsteen mentions Jews in his impressionistic new autobiography “Born to Run,” he’s talking about the family who occupied the other half of a duplex his family moved into in 1966. More specifically, and perhaps not surprisingly, it has to do with the family’s two teenage daughters. “In the half we…
Most Popular
- 1
Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
- 2
Culture A Jewish prophet of the 1980s would be horrified to see that we didn’t heed his warnings
- 3
Opinion With killing of Hezbollah’s chief, Israel occupies the inarguable moral high ground
- 4
Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
In Case You Missed It
-
Film & TV How Leonard Cohen — and a Yom Kippur prayer — inspired a coming-of-age epic
-
Opinion A year after Oct. 7, Israel has the chance to remake its future — for better or worse
-
Opinion Campus protests defined the year since Oct. 7. Could they actually change U.S. policy?
-
Special Report At the kibbutz hit hardest on Oct. 7, a wrenching debate over how to rebuild
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism