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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What Emma Goldman Has in Common — With Bernie Sanders
Emma Goldman (1869–1940), the Lithuanian Jewish anarchist, was widely known in America as Red Emma for her defense of free speech, labor protests, women’s rights and birth control. Although she was deported from the United States in 1919, starting in the 1970s increasing numbers of historians and readers have been drawn to Goldman’s personality and…
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One Tenacious Family, Two Inspiring Rabbis
Cooking for Shabbat dinner, Michael and his daughter Ruth sound like any other father and daughter fortunate enough to spend time in the kitchen together. The conversation was punctuated with the gentle clinking of pots and pans, and Ruth’s occasional kind reminders not to let the salmon burn. But their casual and frank demeanor masks…
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Montreal Is Finally Getting Its Very Own Jewish Museum
After six years of presenting online exhibitions and pop-up events, the Museum of Jewish Montreal is finally getting a permanent brick-and-mortar home. The museum, scheduled to open by the end of May, is located in the city’s Plateau neighborhood, in a circa 1912 building that once housed a garment factory — a remnant of the…
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Film & TV When a Racist Hungary Politician Finds Out He’s Jewish
‘It almost reads like a gag,” Sam Blair said. “Have you heard about the fascist politician who found out he was a Jew?” Blair was talking about Csanád Szegedi, a former leader of Hungary’s extremist right-wing Jobbik party. Jobbik is widely, but not officially, associated with anti-Semitism; as an example, in the run-up to the…
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How I Fell in Love With Justice Louis Brandeis
At our last meeting before Nationals, as a symbol of good luck, Beth and Joe gave each of the five of us — Cora, Sarah, Will, Joseph and me — a small blue bear with “Colorado” embroidered on its chest. It was April 2009, and we were sitting in Joe’s offices in an airy old…
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Journey to a Land Where Jews Are Wax and Anti-Semitism Is Kitsch
Upon entering the restaurant that the charming concierge at the Hotel Grand Lodz had recommended, we froze. Not that I had imagined a deli or South Williamsburg hole-in-the-wall I always wonder if I have the right to wander into, but I was thoroughly unprepared for what awaited us. Outside, the font on the sign over…
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How a Survivor’s Son Is Bringing Baseball to Israel
Baseball in Israel? Yes that most American of games is growing in popularity thanks to individuals like Peter Kurz. The son of a father who fought in the Russian army in World War II and a mother hidden during the Holocaust in her native Hungary, Kurz grew up in Manhattan and was drawn early-on to…
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In Holocaust Novel, She Heard Echoes of Her Own Family
One morning last spring, a colleague of mine told me about a Hungarian novel she’d been sent to consider for publication. She loved what she had read, but wondered if it would be better suited for me. At its most satisfying, our work as book editors introduces us to stories that deepen our experience of…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Philanthropist Jacob Schiff was the keynote speaker at the opening ceremony for the Central Jewish Institute on East 85th Street. The theme of his speech was “Jews as Americans.” He argued that Jews must be Jewish in religion only. If Jews want to become part of general society, he argued, they…
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Why Christians Are Fleeing the Holy Lands
I gaze out over southern Jerusalem as the Catholic priest places the wafer on my tongue. Behind me Beit Jala covers the top of this steep hillside leading down to the Cremisan Valley. We stand among the old olive trees on the slope, six hundred feet below the town. The sun is about to set…
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Why Lorraine Hansberry Called Her Play ‘Up Yours, Edward Albee’
Lorraine Hansberry, who died of pancreatic cancer at age 34, had two plays produced on Broadway in her lifetime. One was “A Raisin in the Sun,” her classic answer to the Langston Hughes question about a dream deferred. The New York Drama Critics Circle named “Raisin” the best American play of the 1958–59 season, and…
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Music How hundreds of forgotten klezmer tunes have been rescued from oblivion
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Culture An activist Jewish artist who used his work to fight fascism
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Fast Forward Pennsylvania principal to be fired over antisemitic voicemail: ‘They control the banks’
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News Jews mobilized for Darfur 20 years ago. As violence surges again, where are they now?
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