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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Michiko Kakutani, Formative New York Times Book Critic, Reviews 8 Jewish Writers
Michiko Kakutani, who as The New York Times’s longtime chief book critic earned both admiration and the ire novelists to whom she dished out less-than-favorable reviews — said novelists tended to be white, male, and accustomed to praise; make of that what you will — is stepping down from her post. As the Times announced…
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‘To The End Of The Land’ Shows The Dream Of Israel — And Its End
A chorus of actors in IDF fatigues raced to the bare white walls framing the stage. Minutes later, when they stepped away, those walls were covered in childlike drawings of a bucolic countryside: Hills, trees, birds, a stream. It was the rare theatrical choice that evokes real wonder, but in “To the End of the…
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When The Forward Was Held Up At Gunpoint
One Friday morning in 1924, an armored car pulled up in front of the old Forward building on East Broadway in Manhattan and disgorged three bank messengers, bearing $11,358 in cash among them. The messengers passed under the gray busts of Marx and Engels, carved in relief high above the office’s arched entryway, and walked…
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‘To The End Of The Land’ Is A Haunting Play About Maternal Anxiety. Written By A Man.
I approached seeing the theatrical adaptation of David Grossman’s brilliant, disturbing novel “To the End of the Land” last night with some trepidation. A long list of notable but misguided literary types had pushed to cancel the production because it is partially supported by an arm of the Israeli government. They were unsuccessful but just…
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Tchaikovsky’s ‘Great’ Big Jewish Problem
LOS ANGELES (JTA) – While researching his latest one-man show, “Our Great Tchaikovsky,” Hershey Felder — a playwright, actor and composer who has brought the loves, torments and soaring music of some of the world’s greatest composers to the stage — faced a moral question. Does towering talent exculpate a composer, or any artist, for…
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Film & TV How To Make A Yiddish Classic When You Don’t Know Any Yiddish
Editor’s Note: Joshua Z. Weinstein’s film “Menashe” is now playing at the Angelika Theater in New York. Earlier this year, Simi Horwitz interviewed the film’s cast and director. Documentarian Joshua Z. Weinstein, 33, who dubs himself a humanist filmmaker, says he never wanted to make a Jewish movie, but rather one that explores the interplay…
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How Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination Left Amos Gitai Searching For The Right Words
Last week, following a one-night-only Manhattan performance of Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai’s “Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination,” I asked a friend what she’d thought of the performance. She wondered, hesitantly, if there needed to be quite so many gunshots. I knew to expect them. The multi-media performance wasn’t Gitai’s first take on the 1995…
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Remembering Gretel Bergmann, Holocaust Survivor And Champion High Jumper
The German Jewish athlete Gretel Bergmann, who died on July 25 at the age of 103, proved that for some Holocaust survivors, there were limits to postwar reconciliation. Barred as a Jew from participating in Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics and forced into exile, Bergmann made a new life in America, starting out as a cleaning…
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‘Menashe’ Pulls Back The Curtain On Hasidic Life In Brooklyn
BOSTON (JTA) — With more than a decade’s worth of experience in the film industry, mostly in documentaries, director Joshua Weinstein has released his first feature-length narrative film. What’s surprising is that Weinstein, a secular Jew, has made a movie entirely in Yiddish. “Menashe,” about Hasidic Jews in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, is…
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Art Tel Aviv’s Love Car Is Israel’s Graffiti In Motion
Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood is known for its constantly changing graffiti — and for the artists, eccentrics, hipsters, and refugees that call it home. But there is also the Love Car. The Love Car changes parking spots, resurfacing in different corners of the neighborhood. Covered in hearts, it is a form of moving graffiti. If…
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Film & TV ‘The Big Sick’ Proves Jews Are No Longer The Face Of American Assimilation
This summer’s hit romantic comedy, “The Big Sick,” offers a hilarious, tender, fresh take on assimilation in America, the struggle to succeed in the entertainment business, and the conflicts surrounding questions of inter-ethnic romance. It is, as others have suggested, the 21st century’s “The Jazz Singer.” And the film is not an ironic parody of…
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