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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Riveting HBO Documentary Revisits Charlie Hebdo Terror Attacks
The cashier tried to stop him. You can’t come in now, she said. But he brushed past her, explaining he just needed bread for Shabbat. Moments later he was dead. All this was recorded on security footage at a kosher supermarket in Paris, a reminder — if one were needed — of the frailty of…
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Why I Remain Connected to the Family of Jews
Some years ago, a close relative — I’ll call him “Cousin Yankel” — got himself into trouble and landed in the local paper. Yankel was a Hasid who’d spent his entire life in sheltered environs, and one day, soon after he got his driver’s license, he made an illegal turn and was pulled over by…
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Why Jewish Critics Were Afraid of Edward Albee
The playwright Edward Albee, who died on September 16 at age 88, is acclaimed today as the author of “The Zoo Story” (1958), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1962), and “A Delicate Balance” (1966). Yet decades ago, he was slated by a number of American Jewish writers, before ultimately being inspired by friendship with a…
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How Av Isaacs Shaped Toronto’s Art Scene
Steve Martin, the actor, has curated a blockbuster Canadiana show on one floor, and a dazzling installation by Chicago art star Theaster Gates occupies another. But the most unusual exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario may be its tribute to Avrom Isaacovitch. Born in Winnipeg to Polish immigrants, Isaacovitch moved to Toronto in 1941,…
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Books A Memoir of Treyf Truthtelling
“There’s always more to all of us,” Elissa Altman explained to me over the phone when talking about the impetus for her second memoir, “Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw,” which is out next week. Altman — a cookbook editor, food writer and James Beard Foundation award-winning author of the blog Poor Man’s Feast…
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400-Year-Old Torah Discovered in Portugal
My 1996 novel “The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon,” begins with the discovery of medieval Portuguese-Jewish manuscripts in the basement of a house being refurbished. So I was initially amazed and then unsurprised when people started messaging me that a 16th or 17th Century Torah scroll found in the small Portuguese city of Covilhã had just…
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An Auschwitz Home Movie Scored by Eric Clapton
‘I’d always avoided Auschwitz,” Philippe Mora says near the beginning of his new documentary, “Three Days in Auschwitz.” “I was like, ‘Who wants to go to Auschwitz?’” Mora’s question is, at least on the surface, perfectly understandable. After all, with any number of exotic and enticing locations currently available for our visiting or vacationing pleasure,…
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1,000-Year-Old ‘Afghan Genizah’ Offers Window on Lost World of Silk Road Jews
The National Library of Israel has purchased the “Afghan Genizah” collection brought to Israel by Israeli antiquities dealer Lenny Wolfe some 10 months ago. The collection includes about 250 documents, most from the 11th century, and were most likely discovered in a cave in northern Afghanistan. About 100 of the manuscripts probably came from the…
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Film & TV ‘High Maintenance’ Is an Elegy for a Dying Profession
It’s ironic that “High Maintenance,” a new HBO series about a New York City pot dealer, appears just as its subject is about to become a thing of the past. As marijuana legalization spreads across the country, buying weed will soon be no sketchier than getting frozen yogurt. But even if “High Maintenance” is a…
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Books Susie Fishbein Says Goodbye to Iconic ‘Kosher By Design’ Series
(JTA) — When Susie Fishbein wrote her first “Kosher By Design” cookbook nearly 15 years ago, she saw an opening in the market for a book in the style of mainstream cooks like Ina Garten and Martha Stewart. “Those were my idols,” she told JTA. As such, Fishbein dreamed of writing a kosher cookbook that…
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Mordecai Richler Gets a Mural in Montreal — And His Son Approves
Mordecai Richler has always been a larger-than-life presence in Montreal. Now, that’s literally the case. The City of Montreal has unveiled an official mural dedicated to the late author, who captured the city’s singular Jewish character — and skewered its often surreal language politics — in potent essays and canonical novels like “The Apprenticeship of…
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Film & TV King David gets the kiddie treatment
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News ‘We are not alright’: How Oct. 7 defined Eric Adams’ Jewish legacy
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Fast Forward Judaism’s Conservative movement apologizes for decades of discouraging intermarriage, signals new approach
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