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
-
What You Shouldn’t Expect When You’re Expecting (and Jewish)
The 20-week ultrasound, the one where you get to see the most detailed image yet of your baby-to-be, is, for many, a time of exquisite exhilaration and wonder at the feat of physics that can capture the contours of your roughly 9-ounce bundle of joy. But as I lay on the table, watching brain quadrants…
-
Art At the Jewish Museum’s Mizrahi Exhibit, a Missed Opportunity
Many years ago, my colleague Maurice Berger and I proposed an exhibition on fashion and the Jews to the powers-that-be at the Jewish Museum. Nothing came of it, save countless meetings and drafts and redrafts of our proposal. The project was shelved. I was delighted, then, to learn of “Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History,” an…
-
Film & TV After All These Years, Are These Movies Still Funny?
The first time I remember being overwhelmed with laughter in a movie theater was when Peter Sellers, as Inspector Jacques Clouseau in “The Return of the Pink Panther,” went airborne with a slow-motion karate kick that sailed over the head of sidekick Cato (Burt Kwouk), through a door and into the mayhem of crashing shelves…
The Latest
-
Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Defense lawyers for Manhattan Lower East Side resident Abraham Rotman called for a retrial after the jury found the defendant guilty of murdering Saul Jacobs by stabbing him on the corner of Eldridge and Stanton streets. Rotman, who was walking with a woman on Stanton Street when the murder took place,…
-
When a Holocaust Memoir Becomes a Ghost Story
But You Did Not Come Back: A Memoir By Marceline Loridan-Ivens Translated by Sandra Smith Atlantic Monthly Press, 112 pages, $22 In 2015, more than 7,000 French Jews immigrated to Israel. A Jewish agency think tank began planning for 120,000 more, roughly a quarter of all the Jews in France. Jewish schoolchildren increasingly cannot attend…
-
How a Suicidal Dog Led a Writer to a Nobel Prize
Pedigree By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 144 Pages, $25 After the Circus By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 216 pages, $16 Paris Nocturne By Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 160 pages, $16 In his recollection of his first 21 years, the Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano writes that, apart from his younger brother, Rudy,…
-
The Secret Jewish History of Nostradamus
This July 2 will mark the 450th anniversary of the death of Nostradamus (1503–1566), the French apothecary and supposed seer of Jewish origin. Born Michel de Nostredame in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, his most famous work was “The Prophecies,” a collection of four-line texts that purported to tell the future. A recent translation by Richard Sieburth reminds…
-
How Richard Linklater’s ‘Everybody Wants Some’ Celebrates Bullying
Because I live in Austin, it’s hard to have perspective on a Richard Linklater movie. Linklater occupies a position in the cultural hierarchy here only slightly behind Willie Nelson. Every time he releases a film, it gets celebrated like a civic holiday. So when I say something like, “I enjoyed “Boyhood” pretty well but I…
-
Brilliant ‘Crucible’ Returns to Broadway With Gripping Message for Age of Trump
“The indigenous American berserk,” Philip Roth called it. He was writing about the violent, calamitous antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s, when the center would not hold, when prosperous, placid Swede Levov, the Newark businessman at the center of Roth’s “American Pastoral,” saw his idyllic life upended by a beloved daughter who went the way…
-
Why Was This Humble Jewish Shoemaker Asked To Join the Ku Klux Klan?
A midsummer rainstorm shot streaks of lightning over the tobacco fields. It had been tough to find a place to pull over to eat our lunch on the shoulderless state highway, so we idled in the parking lot behind a plantation house. I was driving with my family back to Raleigh, North Carolina, from the…
-
Can Jeremiah’s Missive of Love Survive in the Age of Emojis?
Newly engaged, Rachel was visiting her grandparents in Indianapolis. It was a cold Sunday morning, and the family was getting ready for a Colts game. Rushing to get to the stadium, everyone was looking for a bag in which to carry hats and sweaters. Rachel spotted what looked like a usable sack on the top…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Meet the Jewish senator emerging as Chuck Schumer’s heir apparent
- 2
Opinion A Reichstag fire is blazing in Trump’s America and we know exactly who is fanning the flames
- 3
Culture Is Netflix’s new show the most Jewish cartoon ever?
- 4
Opinion Trump’s attacks on the Smithsonian come straight from the Nazi playbook
In Case You Missed It
-
Culture The Borscht Belt was a haven for Jews — and for crossdressers
-
Opinion American Jewish institutions have defied immoral Israeli policy before. They need to do it again
-
Yiddish World Yizkor books and yentas: When New York City was a Yiddish town
-
Opinion Israel is not deliberately killing journalists in Gaza. But it does bear responsibility for their deaths
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
