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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Why 2015 Was the Most Yiddish Year of All
For a supposedly dead or dying language, Yiddish is not going down without a fight. In fact, we’re in the midst of a rich and creative revival such that the language and its culture hasn’t seen in decades. Yiddish Studies programs are cropping up at the unlikeliest of colleges and universities across the United States….
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5 Great Moments From Haskell Wexler’s Career
Haskell Wexler, one of the film world’s most gifted cinematographers, has died at the age of 93. A two-time Academy Award winner and three-time nominee for movies such as “Bound for Glory,” “Blaze” and “Matewan,” Wexler was born in 1922 to a Jewish family in Chicago where he befriended future influential publisher Barney Rosset and…
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The Unseen Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine
At Art Basel in Miami a few weeks ago, it rained a lot, and some critics scorned the commercial excess with extra sharpness. For Basel art in Washington on a recent morning, the sun lit the season’s last leaves and intimate galleries showed rarely seen paintings. A room devoted to Chaïm Soutine and Marc Chagall…
The Latest
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The Jew as Not-So-Other at Yiddish New York
“The Jew as Other” is a theme running throughout the programming of this weekend’s Yiddish New York festival, a first-time event intended to perpetuate the decades-old annual Christmas-week gathering in the Catskills of Yiddish newbies, wannabes, and experts that was KlezKamp, which had its final incarnation last December. You could say “The Jew as Other”…
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Witness to the Prosecution of a Neo-Nazi in Germany
On November 21, 2015, the day that Marcel Zech decided to flaunt his Auschwitz tattoo in a spaßbad in Oranienburg, I had the misfortune of being there as well, together with my nine-year-old son. Seeing that tattoo took my breath away. It permanently shattered the illusion that I have been living under since I arrived…
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Books Is Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ Still Inflammatory or a Tool To Fight Hate — or Both?
BERLIN – For the first time since Hitler’s death, Germany is publishing the Nazi leader’s political treatise “Mein Kampf,” unleashing a highly charged row over whether the text is an inflammatory racist diatribe or a useful educational tool. The 70-year copyright on the text, written by Hitler between 1924-1926 and banned by the Allies at…
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Yiddish Rep’s Controversial Take on Mideast Conflict
Asked if Mario Diament’s play “Land of Fire” seems almost quaint in the wake of recent terrorist attacks, New Yiddish Rep’s artistic director David Mandelbaum didn’t miss a beat. “The play has more resonance than ever,” he said. “There is a major distinction between an Islamic jihadist state and the valid aspirations of the Palestinians…
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Can a Dry Country Like Israel Quench the World’s Thirst?
Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World By Seth M. Siegel Thomas Dunne Books 352 Pages $27.99 Water: the sign of salvation, the portal to purity, the source of simcha. It is an inescapable part of Jewish practice, a recurring motif throughout the religious life of a Jew. Jews beseech God daily…
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A Close Encounter With Asia’s Anti-Semitic Capital
On a recent stopover in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a cemented-over pile of ugly skyscrapers and canyons strewn with street beggars, I strolled through the garish Twin Towers Shopping Mall. In an underground supermarket, I passed an employee at the fish counter — a short, squat young man who stared at me with violent hatred. I…
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Music Yiddish New York Transports Viewers to an Alternative Universe
During a week in which one can attend a revival of a Yiddish language musical from the golden era of Second Avenue (“The Golden Bride” by the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage through January 3); or enjoy a critically acclaimed updated Broadway staging of “Fiddler on the Roof,” the musical that…
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How Dylan Thomas Wrote My Favorite Jewish Christmas Story
We grew up Irish on Chicago’s northwest side. Or maybe Scottish. Possibly Welsh. Somewhere from that general part of the world, anyway. My mother has always been fond of Irish names — she would’ve named me Shawn, she said, if she hadn’t named me after her father, Abe, an inventor with fiery red hair; whenever…
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