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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Calvin Trillin Talks Jokes, Journalism — and Judaism
(JTA) — Writer Calvin Trillin may be most famous today for his humorous musings on food, family, travel and love. But before he won the Thurber Prize for Humor in 2013; before “Uncivil Liberties,” his humor column for The Nation — he has lovingly called it “a pinko magazine published on cheap paper” where he…
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How Strat-O-Matic Baseball Changed My Life Forever
On a warm afternoon in the autumn of 1976, my friend Jonathan took me up to his family’s dusty attic playroom and introduced me to something that would change my life forever. No, it wasn’t my first puff of weed, my first look at National Lampoon (or Hustler), or even my first listen to the…
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Remembering Michael Herr, Unparalleled Chronicler of Vietnam
In “First Kill,” a 2001 Dutch documentary film, Michael Herr, who died on June 23 at age 76, reflected on his unlikely fame as author of the novelized memoir “Dispatches” and co-screenwriter of the films “Full Metal Jacket” and “Apocalypse Now,” all about the Vietnam War: “I’m a nice middle class Jewish boy. I’m not…
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Meet Ahamed Weinberg: The Jewish-Muslim-Catholic Comedian
Growing up, Ahamed Weinberg had a one-of-a-kind answering machine message. It would leave some callers perplexed. “As-salamu alaykum, you’ve reached the Weinbergs!” Weinberg, now 26, is channeling his hybrid identity into comedy. The son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, both of whom converted to Islam in Philadelphia, he’s spent years explaining his…
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Why I’ll Never Live in England Again After Brexit
In September 1938, six weeks before Kristallnacht, my German Jewish grandfather, who had fought for his country in the First World War, left Berlin on one of the proverbial last trains out. After several years in New York and then Knoxville, he would eventually settle in Texas in 1943. In Berlin he had been a…
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Art How J.J. Tiziou Is Taking Over the National Museum
I nearly stepped on the tall, bearded man laying out pairs of big red headshots on the floor of a hallway in the offices of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It was J.J. Tiziou — who you might know best from the massive photographic installation of “How Philly Moves” between the…
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Seven Holocaust Memoirs You Must Read
The personal is political, but the personal is also a powerful tool to come to grips with historical events that tragically transcend individuals, families and even nations. The inexpressible loss of European Jewry in the Shoah has led many scholars and artists to address the phenomenon in a number of creative ways. With the help…
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Reconstructing a Child’s Life During the Holocaust
A History of the Grandparents I Never Had By Ivan Jablonka Stanford University Press, 352 pages, $30 Perhaps no moment in modern history has been written about as much as the Shoah. Historians and memoirists, in particular, have striven to re-create or retell this event. While the two genres are distinct, the dividing line between…
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Art Can You Tell a Shakespeare Play By Its Poster?
Against a red background, a featureless white head, lacking its crown, opens to reveal a set of white steps descending into a black cavern. A man in profile, the barest combination of ivory skin and black robe, stares down into the almost pleading sockets of a skull in his hands. A shining, simple crown hovers…
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A Concert of Talented Men
Last year Yiddish Soul was the highlight of the Folksbiene’s Kulturfest, a festival that featured hundreds of performances over eight packed days and attracted tens of thousands of attendees. At the time, I wrote in the Yiddish Forward that this high-profile concert of Hasidic and cantorial music, presented as part of SummerStage in Central Park,…
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Remembering the Simple Life in Eastern Europe
This past March, three weeks before she passed away, my bubbe, Charlotte Friend, celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday. On that day, as on every other birthday she’d had over the last twenty or so years, she received several phone calls from her Russian friends — women (and a few men) to whom she had taught English…
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Yiddish שילאַ רײַך, באַליבטע ייִדיש־לערערין אין לאָס־אַנדזשעלעס, איז אַוועקSheila Reich, beloved LA Yiddish teacher, has died
אין קלאַס זענען די סטודענטן אָפֿט געווען אױף פֿאַרשידענע ניװאָען אָבער זי האָט זיך אָפּגעגעבן מיט יעדן באַזונדער.
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Fast Forward EU sanctions Israeli settlers after Hungary, under new leadership, clears path