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
-
I have seen the future of America — in a pastrami sandwich in Queens
San Wei, which serves pastrami sandwiches along with churros and biang biang noodles, represents an immigrant's fulfillment of the American dream
-
WATCH: Patti Smith Sing For Bob Dylan at Nobel Ceremony
Amid a somewhat dour and all-too-respectful crowd who gathered today for the 2016 Nobel Prize ceremony in Sweden, Patti Smith took the stage to deliver a perhaps all-too-reverential performance of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Smith was subbing for the absent Dylan who did not attend the ceremony to accept his prize before…
-
Meet Daniel Levitin — A Polymath in the Truest Sense of the Word
Driving his 20-year-old Mercedes-Benz up and around the winding roads toward his house in the hills in a semirural area of San Francisco’s East Bay, Daniel J. Levitin is an enthusiastic guide to the abundant variety of trees in his neighborhood: California live oak, redwood, Pacific madrone. Suddenly, he brakes while making a turn and…
The Latest
-
Here’s a Book That’s as Big as New York — And Almost as Jewish
Nonstop Metropolis Edited By Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly Schapiro University of California Press, 232 Pages, $29.95 It’s not often you see a book release like the one that recently took place for “Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.” The Queens Museum hosted a launch party featuring a mapmaking workshop, a soundtrack of “songs…
-
In Poland, Artistic Excavations Reveal a Lost World of Jews
This article, which originally appeared in the Forverts, is one of a four-part series by Barbara Finkelstein about her recent trip to Poland. The Grodzka Gate Centre in the city of Lublin came into being in the early 1990s, when Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, a physics student, set out to establish an independent theater in the Grodzka…
-
New Exhibit on Jewish Postcards Set To Open at The Museum on Eldridge Street
The Museum at Eldridge Street, located inside a National Historic Landmark 19th century synagogue, has an interesting exhibition coming up next week – and it couldn’t come at a better time. The exhibition, which is being put on in conjuction with the Blavatnik Archive Foundation (“a non-profit foundation dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of primary…
-
How I Reunited My Holocaust Survivor Father With His Long Lost Neighbor
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Jerzy “Jurek” Skarżyński had been up half the night. The next day he was going to meet the daughter and grandson of a Jewish man who once lived in Uchanie, his home village, and his mind would not slow down. Jurek, a Polish Christian, had not spoken…
-
Heirs of German Jewish Art Dealer File Lawsuit Against Bavaria
Another day, another lawsuit against the German government for art stolen by the Nazis. Per a New York Times report, the heirs of German-Jewish art dealer and collector Alfred Flechtheim, sued the German state of Bavaria on Monday, saying that it has consistently refused to return works of art that the plaintiffs assert were stolen…
-
50 Years Later, Israel’s Basketball Hero Tal Brody Remembers His Glory Days
It’s been almost 50 years, but people still stop Tal Brody on the streets of Israel and shake his hand. Or they wave and smile from a distance, all hoping to make contact with a national hero. Brody helped snap the country out of its deep funk following the 1972 Olympic Massacre and the 1973…
-
Forward Looking Back
100 Years Ago Jews in Manhattan’s Harlem are in fear after a terrible murder of a Jewish woman took place in her apartment on 101st Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. The victim, Rosa Zemkin, was found by her husband, who works in a tailor shop. When he came home at 7 p.m., he found…
-
Could a Song Save the World? And Other Things That Make Us Go ‘Ugh!’
If everyone in the world were a classical musician, we’d long ago have made peace in the Middle East. That’s a realization I had in the early 2000s, reading in the Times about yet another youth orchestra for Israeli and Palestinian prodigies — or maybe it was a chess program for Jewish and Muslim grandmasters…
-
Harold Prince Produced Broadway Musicals — Now He’s the Subject of One
If you love “West Side Story,” “”Cabaret,” or “Sweeney Todd,” you love Harold Prince: the theatrical producer and director collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on each of those beloved shows. That’s not enough to convince you? He also produced the original “Fiddler on the Roof,” directed and co-conceived the 1998 dramatization of Leo Frank’s trial and…
Most Popular
- 1
News School Israel trip turns ‘terrifying’ for LA students attacked by Israeli teens
- 2
Culture Cardinals are Catholic, not Jewish — so why do they all wear yarmulkes?
- 3
Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
- 4
Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Trump’s new pick for surgeon general blames the Nazis for pesticides on our food
-
Fast Forward Jewish feud over Trump escalates with open letter in The New York Times
-
Fast Forward First American pope, Leo XIV, studied under a leader in Jewish-Catholic relations
-
Fast Forward Ye debuts ‘Heil Hitler’ music video that includes a sample of a Hitler speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism