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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Love in the Time of Viagra
Scary Old Sex: Stories By Arlene Heyman Bloomsbury USA, 240 pages, $26 In this era of energetically aging baby boomers and gauzy Viagra advertisements, discussing postmenopausal sex is not quite the taboo-shattering enterprise of yesteryear. But that fact doesn’t render Arlene Heyman’s debut short-story collection any less powerful or engaging. Heyman’s characters use sex to…
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Batman V. Superman, A Rabbi Weighs In
As the self proclaimed “comic book rabbi,” the question I hear more than any other is not Talmudic or Halachic but: “Who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman?” It’s a question fanboys (including me) have asked for generations. And it’s a question that we’re promised will finally be answered in Hollywood’s latest…
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The Moving Story of a 94-Year Old’s Deathbed Bar Mitzvah
Over the course of the past year, there were periods of warning that my husband, Marty, was beginning to suffer from dementia. An advanced mathematician, public school administrator and college professor, he was no longer able to do even simple math problems or play chess, his favorite pastime. In addition, his once robust appetite had…
The Latest
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Leah Garrett on the Greatest Generation of American Novelists
Leah Garrett, author of “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel,” is great-great-granddaughter of Baruch Charney Vladeck, long-time manager of the Yiddish “Forverts.” She is professor of contemporary Jewish life and culture at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. An expert on Yiddish travel writing and the effect of Richard Wagner’s music on…
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Zionist Dreams and Realities Collide in New Documentary
“How do you reform yourself,” the playwright Motti Lerner asks, “after you’ve been broken?” That’s the first question posed in Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky’s new documentary “Colliding Dreams.” Lerner is talking about the Hebrew word tikkun, which translates roughly to “rectification” and signifies an ancient Jewish focus on the reparation of the world. It’s…
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Maya Plisetskaya’s Spirit Dances On
As Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet prepared for the first performance of its brief residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a gale-battered audience made its way to the doors. Speaking a mix of Russian and English and clad in an inordinate amount of fur, they came to pay homage to one of Russia’s premier ballet companies,…
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Film & TV Sacha Baron Cohen’s Long Journey From Anatevka to ‘Grimsby’
For the loudest person in the room, Sacha Baron Cohen took a while to find his public voice. Or voices. From the time we met as 16-year-olds, through our college years and while we lived together, Sacha was always the center of attention and always the funniest person around. But people underestimate his commitment to…
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Dr. Strangelove’s Jewish Set Designer Dies at 95
Ken Adam, the German Jewish motion picture production designer who won immortality for conceiving the sets for James Bond films in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as well as the Pentagon War Room in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), proved that fantasy can heal historical wounds. Born Klaus Hugo Adam, he died on March 10 at age…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Boris Thomashefsky is currently playing the role of Piterknap, the poor coalman, in the production of Avraham Shomer’s “Der Griner Milyoner” (“The Immigrant Millionaire”) at the National Theater, in New York City. His character sells coal from a pushcart, is dirt poor, dresses shabbily, scarfs down pickles and tells crude jokes…
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How Golf Became a Tool of Assimilation
I’ve gone to South Florida to give a talk. But first, there’s lunch with the relatives whom I haven’t seen in over a decade. We meet at “the club.” The centerpiece of my cousins’ lives, everything is oriented around it, from their homes to their calendars. We keep the conversation light, and talk of children…
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Music Being BFF’s at the New York Philharmonic
Critics aren’t liable for the headlines the copy desk gives to reviews, so no point chiding The New York Times’s James Oestreich for the burdened praise pinned on a rising Israeli pianist’s recent New York recital: “Inon Barnatan Soldiers Through Hallowed Works.” I winced, because the review itself described a “fascinating and rewarding” evening of…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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