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
-
Film & TV
Film About Streit’s Debuts As The Factory Is Demolished
Last spring when Michael Levine, the filmmaker of “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream” was in the final days of editing and had already shipped a copy off to film festivals, he received word from the Streit family that the factory he had been documenting over the past two years was closing and moving to…
-
Why This Is An Off Year for New Haggadot — and That’s Not a Bad Thing
Just a few years ago, my annual review of new Haggadahs marveled at the novelty of a Haggadah app, a DIY Haggadah website, and other new-media ways in which 21st century Jews were remixing this 3rd century hodgepodge of texts. Now, as with new media and old media in general, the novelties have taken over….
-
Film & TV A Warsaw Ghetto TV Drama From Mr. Twilight Zone
When a group of young Jewish men and women stockpiled arms and rose up against their Nazi oppressors in the Warsaw Ghetto, 73 years ago today, they surely weren’t motivated by the idea that what they were doing would make for good TV. But in the decades since that Passover eve, countless novels, plays, poems,…
The Latest
-
The Inconvenient Truths of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas
In 1996, David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel. This was in response to her having termed him a Holocaust denier in her book “Denying the Holocaust.” As the case was coming to trial, perhaps the most dumbfounding reactions came from those members of the clubby British history and journalism…
-
How My 10-Year-Old Daughter Solved Clinton vs. Sanders Dilemma
I had been on the fence about who I’d support in the Democratic primary and it sounded like a good pair of field trips — take my 5th grade daughter to one Bernie Sanders event and one Hillary Clinton event and, on the basis of her reactions, decide who I’d vote for. Whitney Houston may…
-
The Forward Building: From Labor Citadel to Luxury Condos
At the corner of East Broadway and Canal, in the heart of Manhattan’s now chic Lower East Side, young men and women lined up on a recent Saturday night, waiting patiently to be seated at Mission Chinese Food, a downtown fixture decorated with a bright red awning and thick curtains. With faces turned to the…
-
Molly Crabapple Explains How You Can Be an Artist and an Activist
Walking into artist and author Molly Crabapple’s apartment in New York City’s Financial District, I briefly thought I’d wandered into a painting I once studied in art history: David Teniers’ “Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in His Gallery.” The painting’s nominal focus is a group of men, archduke included, but they almost disappear beneath the riot of…
-
We Were Aliens in Egypt — and I Still Am Today
The first time I felt a pressing need to visit a synagogue after officially discarding religious observance was less than a year later, in September 2008, while passing through Nashville, Tennessee. My friend Mordy and I had set out on a road trip several days earlier, in anticipation of the first High Holy Day season…
-
Film & TV ‘Wedding Doll’ Is Israeli Romance With No Hollywood Ending In Sight
In the 1993 movie “Benny and Joon,” Sam (Johnny Depp), a strange and illiterate young man, falls in love with Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson), an artistic young woman who suffers from occasional psychotic episodes. Aside from the odd breakdown, though, you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with her. As Sam says to Joon’s brother…
-
Art How Berlin Laid Groundwork for Holocaust With Theft of Jewish Property
When Dr. Joanne Intrator’s father, Gerhard Intrator, was dying, he had one wish: that his daughter fight for the property the family had been forced to abandon when they fled the Nazis. True to her word, Intrator, a psychiatrist based on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, set out for Germany to lay claim to the buildings…
-
What Arnold Wesker Talked About When He Talked About Jerusalem
Arnold Wesker, the British Jewish playwright who died on April 12 at age 83, might have been the most ardent explorer of the kibbutz ethos in English theatrical history. In his explicitly back-to-the-land play, “I’m Talking about Jerusalem” (1960), Ada Kahn, daughter of the Jewish family featured in an earlier play, “Chicken Soup with Barley,”…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Exclusive Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure you
- 2
Culture 70 years ago, this Jewish choreographer predicted our epidemic of loneliness and isolation
- 3
Opinion Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews
- 4
Culture The original anti-Zionists have been all but forgotten. Molly Crabapple wants to change that.
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Viktor Orbán may fall. Netanyahu should be next
-
Opinion Hungary is poised to topple an authoritarian leader. American Jews have something to learn
-
Fast Forward 42 Jewish authors slam Jewish Book Council for ‘bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices’
-
Fast Forward Temple Israel rabbi criticizes Michigan Senate candidate for ‘offensive’ remarks about attack
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
