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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How Pianist Irving Fields Redefined Jewish Music
Irving Fields, the songwriter and pianist who died on August 20 at age 101, revealed talent that transcended the question of what is authentic Jewish music. Born Yitzhak Schwartz in New York to parents from Minsk and Pinsk, he was raised in Coney Island and Bensonhurst. An amateur choir singer, his father got him involved…
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How Steven Hill, ‘Law & Order’ Actor, Chose Orthodox Faith Over Stardom
Steven Hill, an actor who died on August 23 at age 94, showed how the solution for existential unease may be found in Jewish ritual rather than in a life devoted to performance. Born Solomon Krakovsky in Seattle, Hill won fame from 1990 to 2000 in the role of Manhattan District Attorney Adam Schiff on…
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Play Inspired By Gilad Shalit Finds Humanity In Captivity
The day after I saw Cassie M. Seinuk’s “From the Deep,” a play about the mental struggles of captivity, at NYC Fringe, I ran into Charles Linshaw, one of two actors in the play, waiting in line to see another Fringe production. Even though I knew that Linshaw, who plays the Israeli Ilan in “From…
The Latest
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Cynthia Ozick Has Issues — And Come To Think of It, So Do We
CRITICS, MONSTERS, FANATICS, AND OTHER LITERARY ESSAYS By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 224 pages, $25 It’s a little tricky, perhaps, to complain about Cynthia Ozick’s take on book reviewers in “Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays” when I made my living for many years reviewing books. How can I play anything other than…
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Why Yiddish Is Gaining Traction in Secular Households
There once was a place known as Yiddish Land. It wasn’t a country. In fact, it lived and breathed for a thousand years in total disregard for the invisible borders sovereign nations fought and died over. Its citizens — German Jews, Polish Jews, Jews throughout Central Europe and across the world — numbered nearly 12…
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What’s Behind the Boom in Orthodox Women Singers?
‘My singing is not an act of rebellion. It’s what I’m meant to do,” said Perl Wolfe, lead singer of the now defunct Hasidic rock band Bulletproof Stockings. “The rebbe said, ‘You’re supposed to take your God-given talents and use them for the betterment of human kind.’ I’m creating a space for women to have…
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How To Read The Talmud With Strings Attached
How many guitars do you have?” a friend asked me recently, knowing that a new one was about to arrive. “Oh, we don’t count them,” I told her jokingly as my wife, Barbara, raised her hands and flashed her palms with all her fingers up. “All I can say,” I said, “is that if they…
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How Judaism Still Brings My Father Closer to Me
Shortly after my mother left him, my father started going to synagogue regularly for the first time in his life. He would bring 7-year-old me with him on Friday nights as the official start to our weekends together, usually followed by banana splits at Baskin-Robbins. He’d been untethered before, living in an abandoned factory in…
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At the New Museum, We’re All Collectors — Especially the Museum Itself
There’s much to be learned from the name of the New Museum’s new exhibit “The Keeper.” The show is in fact an assemblage of the efforts of numerous keepers, artists who have collected, arranged, stored and displayed objects in unusual ways. It makes the singular title a bit of an odd fit. Is the exhibit…
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This May Be the Last Chance To Tell The Story of These Survivors
Ari Rath met me at the door of his friend Saleh Turujman’s apartment. It was a brilliantly sunny Friday morning in Washington, D.C., but the men were tucked up inside this eighth-floor space with views overlooking the Jefferson Memorial. Images and artifacts of Jerusalem were on every flat surface, every wall, every shelf. Rath is…
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Why ‘Ben-Hur’ Is More Than Just Another Jesus Flick
It’s hard to make a new movie about Jesus. True, the Gospels are full of intrigue, betrayal and violence, rich material for cinematic adaptation. But film versions of the New Testament are plentiful. Between the products aimed straight at the Sunday School crowd, and the torture porn of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,”…
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