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
-
Brilliant ‘Crucible’ Returns to Broadway With Gripping Message for Age of Trump
“The indigenous American berserk,” Philip Roth called it. He was writing about the violent, calamitous antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s, when the center would not hold, when prosperous, placid Swede Levov, the Newark businessman at the center of Roth’s “American Pastoral,” saw his idyllic life upended by a beloved daughter who went the way…
-
Why Was This Humble Jewish Shoemaker Asked To Join the Ku Klux Klan?
A midsummer rainstorm shot streaks of lightning over the tobacco fields. It had been tough to find a place to pull over to eat our lunch on the shoulderless state highway, so we idled in the parking lot behind a plantation house. I was driving with my family back to Raleigh, North Carolina, from the…
-
Can Jeremiah’s Missive of Love Survive in the Age of Emojis?
Newly engaged, Rachel was visiting her grandparents in Indianapolis. It was a cold Sunday morning, and the family was getting ready for a Colts game. Rushing to get to the stadium, everyone was looking for a bag in which to carry hats and sweaters. Rachel spotted what looked like a usable sack on the top…
The Latest
-
Remembering the Indomitable Jewish Spirit of Imre Kertész
The Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész, who died on March 31 at age 86, was ferociously uncompromising in his identity as a Jewish writer. In novels such as “Fatelessness,” (1975) expressing his experiences as a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as well as “Dossier K: A Memoir,” (2006) an unfettered self-interview, Kertész situated himself in…
-
100 Years Later, a Cinematic Time Capsule Is Opened
Movies — so thought a strain of film scholars famously led by Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer — are best seen as captured reality. Momentary history seized in amber. Aesthetics aside, it’s hard to argue, given how much human history in the past 125 years would’ve been lost to our eyes had it not been…
-
Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago When New York City police busted a ring of African-American thieves on 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, one of the arrestees was identified as Robert Lelly. But when Lelly was put in front of a judge, he declared that he was actually a white Jew by the name of…
-
Why Hank Greenberg Never Became a New York Yankee
Hall of Fame baseball player Hank Greenberg grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium yet never played for his hometown Yankees. Why not? The Yankees did in fact pursue the young prospect. Paul Krichell, the scout famous for discovering Lou Gehrig, recognized another raw talent in Greenberg and figured — as the New York…
-
Family, Faith, Food and Other Keys to Becoming the World’s Oldest Man
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. One day shortly after the outbreak of World War I, when Yisrael Kristal was a child, word spread throughout his hometown of Zarnow, about fifty miles from Lodz, that Emperor Franz Joseph was visiting a nearby town. The boy, along with a group of Jews from his…
-
Books New Cookbook Is Chef’s Love Letter to Mediterranean Diet
Eighty is an age when many people would be resting on their laurels and hanging up their chef’s whites — especially someone like Joyce Goldstein, the former Chez Panisse Café chef who went on to run her own Mediterranean restaurant and has written numerous cookbooks. But when you open your first restaurant at 49, as…
-
Judaica For Sale at the Dachau Gift Shop
This past fall, my family was planning a trip to some of Northern Europe’s greatest cities — Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin and Munich. Dachau is just a one-hour drive northwest of Munich, which was to be our final city before returning stateside. And so we put the former concentration camp on our itinerary. Once in Munich,…
-
Susan Klebold Doesn’t Believe God Is Watching Over Her Family Anymore
In the days after Dylan Klebold along with Eric Harris shot and killed 12 students and one teacher and then himself at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, his mother, Sue Klebold, remembered a kind of “religious warfare” in the community of Littleton, Colorado. The notion that she hadn’t raised her son to be…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
- 2
Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
- 3
Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
- 4
Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Elected PA Jewish judge leaves Democratic party, citing ‘disturbingly common’ antisemitism
-
Fast Forward At Abraham Foxman’s funeral, an elegy for the last generation with direct ties to the Holocaust
-
Fast Forward Israeli report on ‘systematic’ Oct. 7 sexual violence seeks to shift debate from denial to accountability
-
News Mamdani supersizes NYC hate crimes office, as tensions simmer over synagogue protests