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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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…
The Latest
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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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How To Make an Unorthodox Playlist For Your Orthodox Rabbi
A few weeks ago, after Sabbath- morning services at my local Chabad, my spiritual leader, Rabbi Yossi, asked me for a favor: He wanted me to choose 20 songs for him to listen to, secular music with a Jewish vibe. He had recently heard Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fire,” derived from the High Holidays prayer,…
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Yoga Helps Teachers Connect To Jewish Values
Halfway through the 16-day Breathe for Change teacher-training program – on a day called “Breathe for Communication” – 50 teachers sat inside the Speyer School in Manhattan, eager to learn how to “foster deeper relationships.” The teachers assumed crisscross positions, like their own students might do. One woman ate a peanut-butter sandwich from a Ziploc…
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The Earth Moved For Them — Did It Move For You?
The Louisville Jewish Community Center has had a garden for years, but never the staff to make the most of it. For Michael Fraade, a member of the first cohort of Hazon’s JOFEE Fellowship who is spending the year working on the JCC’s environmental programming, that garden has the potential to change the ways 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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