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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What The Desecrated Jewish Cemeteries Mean For The Living And The Dead
Why does the sight of a toppled gravestone incense us so sorely? As a way in, imagine a different sort of scenario, one perhaps more visceral and more literal in its horror. Imagine the photographs of Roman Vishniac from his book, “A Vanished World.” The photographs depict Eastern European shtetl life just before the cataclysm…
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Daphne Merkin Reports From the Front Lines of Depression
In “The Depressed Person,” David Foster Wallace, no stranger to depression, posits that the pain wrought by “the impossibility of sharing or articulating” the condition of being depressed “was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” The story details the depressed person’s “clumsy attempts to describe at least…
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Theater David Mamet Finds God, Still Searches For Inspiration
David Mamet has written a new play, and, unlike his last three new ones produced in New York, it is not offensively bad. It is merely not at all good. That’s not quite true. It is potentially, slightly, maybe a little bit good. It is centered on a kernel of a good and interesting idea:…
The Latest
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Holocaust Scholar Threatened With Deportation Asks ‘Is The United States Still The United States?’
When Henry Rousso landed at Houston’s George Bush International Airport on February 22, the Paris-based historian, who studies Holocaust-era Europe, was expecting a smooth entry to the country, where he was scheduled to attend a symposium at Texas A&M University. After all, as an academic Rousso had spent 30 years making international trips for conferences….
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How Can Such An Unpopular President Deliver Such Popular Sentences?
Donald Trump is apparently more popular at the sentence level than he is as a person or as a President, according to an intriguing new poll released today by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. The poll of 1000 adults, polled February 18-22, found that a whopping 86 percent approved of this line from…
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How a Stolen Picasso Inspired an L.A. Story
Ellen Umansky’s first novel, “The Fortunate Ones,” features two protagonists and innumerable weighty subjects: the Holocaust, the effect of divorce on children, the death of a parent, art theft, the Kindertransports, art restitution, family secrets, guilt and life in postwar London. It centers on a (fictional) painting by the (real) Jewish expressionist Chaim Soutine, a…
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Why a 400-Year-Old Jewish Music Tradition Continues To Thrive
Klezmer, the Eastern European musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews, is constantly evolving. Played by musicians called klezmorim at weddings and other celebrations, it has enjoyed a world revival in recent years. The musician and researcher Walter Zev Feldman, an expert on Jewish and Ottoman Turkish music, is Visiting Professor of Music at NYU Abu…
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Sana Krasikov Had No Idea How Timely Her Epic Novel Would Be
Two weeks before the inauguration of President Trump, in a quiet diner some 25 miles up the Hudson, from Manhattan, Sana Krasikov said something she could not have imagined would be as prescient as, in retrospect, it clearly was. “I was asked after my last book, ‘What’s your most valued possession?’” she told me. “I…
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Some People Really Need To Stop Calling Themselves Refugees
I would never dare call myself a refugee. Nor would I ever hold up a sign that reads “I am a refugee.” Although, technically, I’m a refugee. That is, I’m an immigrant who had entered the United States thanks to my refugee status. That was what they called it in those days — “Refugee Status.”…
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With Trump Travel Ban Suspended, What Will Filmmakers From Targeted Countries Do For The Oscars?
The 2017 film awards show circuit has been more politically charged than most, from Meryl Streep’s speech criticizing President Trump for mocking a disabled reporter during his 2016 campaign to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ pointedly humorous imitation of Trump, performed as she accepted a Screen Actors Guild Award for her role on HBO’s “Veep.” Central to Hollywood’s…
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This Archive Of Rare Recordings Is A Perfect Weekend Project
Yesterday, we wrote about the incredible resource that is ubu.com – an internet archive of all things avant-garde. It’s a tremendous place to get lost, but, although it may be the finest, there are other such archival rabbit-holes on the internet (isn’t the entire internet really just one archival rabbit hole anyways?). There’s Monoskop, Memory of…
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