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
-
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…
-
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…
The Latest
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
- 2
Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
- 3
Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
- 4
Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
In Case You Missed It
-
News Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls
-
Fast Forward Michael Jackson biopic revives legend of Jewish music mogul who battled MTV’s ‘color barrier’
-
Fast Forward DOGE’s cuts to Jewish humanities grants were unconstitutional, judge rules
-
Fast Forward As anti-LGBTQ laws spread, these two Jewish nonprofits are funding moves to safer states