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
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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How Do You Teach the Holocaust to Kids Who’ve Never Heard of It?
By the time my third-grade teacher assigned Lois Lowry’s “Number the Stars,” I already had a basic understanding of the Holocaust. We sat in a circle to discuss the text as part of a lunchtime book club. My fellow classmates expressed awe at how scary it must have been for the main character to hide…
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How Facebook Live Helps Michael Hirsch Remember the Triangle Fire
Watching a visit to a cemetery streamed on Facebook Live might not sound like the most engrossing of afternoons, but in the hands of photographer, journalist, and historical researcher Michael Hirsch, it’s a rarely interesting occupation. On a recent late-August Tuesday, Hirsch wasn’t visiting just any cemetery. He was making a pilgrimage to see some…
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The Lurking Dead
I was 9 when my grandfather died. For a year or two after his funeral, bruises would appear on my body. Large or small, yellow or blue, round or misshapen. My mother was concerned. She kept asking me if everything was okay at school. I said yes, everything was okay; I just bumped into things…
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The Surprising Jewish Story Behind Indie Rock Legend Brix Smith-Start
She’s lived so many lives that it’s hard to believe Brix Smith-Start is only 53. A teen rebel who idolized British punk, she lived a dream by marrying British musician Mark E. Smith, founder of the hugely influential band The Fall and became his band’s unlikely lead guitarist at 20. After the couple’s disastrous split,…
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Why We Need To Remember Gene Wilder in ‘The Frisco Kid’
The late Gene Wilder is best known for his performance as the title character in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” a dandy in his royal purple suit, and orange felt top hat. The retrospectives published this week in print, radio and online recall his roles in movies such as “Blazing Saddles”, “Young Frankenstein”, “Everything…
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Does Jonathan Safran Foer Matter?
Six years ago, when I was 17 years old and a month into college at Washington University in St. Louis, I met Jonathan Safran Foer. I didn’t know he was speaking on my campus until the day of the event, and I reacted with a kind of seismic glee specific to small events of seemingly…
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Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Ambitious and Incredibly Long New Novel
Here I Am By Jonathan Safran Foer Farrar, Straus and Giroux $28, 592 pages By Yevgeniya Traps ‘Here I Am,” the title of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel, is an allusion to the story of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son: Called upon by God, Abraham responds “Here I am,” an apparent acquiescence to the…
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Forward Looking Back
100 Years Ago Here in America, the Sabbath has become a different experience than it was in the old country, due mainly to the very different circumstances in which Jews find themselves. The same Old World Jews who once kept the Sabbath as something precious have changed their ways, and many of them gave up…
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How Gene Wilder Celebrated the Black-Jewish Alliance in ‘Blazing Saddles’
(JTA) — Last year I joined some 3,000 people at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark for a wide-screen showing of Mel Brooks’ 1974 Western parody “Blazing Saddles.” In the onstage interview that followed, Brooks, then 89, was beside himself in his delight at sharing his 42-year-old comedy with a real live audience….
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When Holocaust Survivor Tormented Hitler’s Henchman — as Told to ‘This American Life’
(JTA) — It sounds like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino film. A Holocaust survivor, whose mother and sister were killed in the genocide, said he locked a Nazi prisoner in a shed for three days, made him strip and urinated on his face, “This American Life,” the weekly public radio show, Sunday. “I told him, from…
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The Secret Jewish History of Esperanto
The deadly pogroms that swept through Eastern Europe following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 encouraged some Jews to become socialists, others Zionists, others emigrants. In 1887, Ludwik Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist born in Bialystok and based in Warsaw, Poland, became the inventor of the most widely spoken constructed language, what came to…
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