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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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…
The Latest
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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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10 Overlooked Jewish Films That You Can Stream For Free Right Now
The Internet is filled with oddities and lost gems. We took a dive into YouTube and found that some of the most interesting Jewish films are out there. And you can watch them right now. 1) The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz Ted Kotcheff’s 1974 screen adaptation of Mordechai Richler’s classic coming-of-age novel starred a young…
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Why Isn’t Frederick Kiesler a Household Name?
A paradox lies at the core of Frederick Kiesler’s legacy. Over a career that spanned half a century, the protean and tireless architect, designer and theoretician actually built precious little. His most famous and, arguably, most radical design, the free-form pod-like “Endless House,” never yielded a satisfactory prototype, despite nearly 40 years of planning; few…
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The Jewish Museum in a Town With Only One Jew In It
From Berlin to Moscow; London to Vienna; Copenhagen, Denmark, to Budapest, Hungary, and, recently, Warsaw, Poland, the map of Europe is dotted with museums dedicated to the history and culture of Jewish communities past and present. Although the Jewish Museum in Prague dates back to 1906, the majority of Jewish museums now on a Jewish…
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Happy 100th Birthday to Roald Dahl — Beloved Author and Vile Anti-Semite
Born on September 13, 1916, Roald Dahl, the beloved author of “Matilda” and “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” would have turned 100 today. It’s an anniversary we mark with admiration and a bit of uncertainty as well. For, aside from his brilliant imaginaton and wicked sense of humor, Dahl was also something of an…
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Why Dead Languages Like Akkadian Still Matter
I grew up hearing the Code of Hammurabi read out loud, in Akkadian, at the dining-room table. I did not know that my graduate-student mother was one of Akkadian’s few regular readers. The language of the ancient Akkad region, or modern-day Iraq, is considered a “dead language,” just like Ugaritic and Phoenician. All these dead…
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How in the World Did Cuneiform Cookies Become a Thing?
Cuneiform cookies? Yes, they are a thing. Though it has been centuries since Akkadian was spoken, cuneiform writing has had an unexpected burst of popularity as a cookie decoration. The idea started with Katy Blanchard, the Fowler/Van Santvoord Keeper of the Near Eastern Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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