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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Caught Between the Yeshiva and the Deep Blue Sea
When I was in yeshiva, there was a man who had been in beit medrash every day since 1953. Yes, every day in the afternoon he came to study the holy books, without fail. He had started as a young boy, and by the time I was 20, he was in his 50s. He had…
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‘Transparent’ Is Back — and It’s as Good (and Jewish) as Ever
When we last left “Transparent’”s Pfefferman clan, they were scavenging the leftovers – chopped liver, coleslaw and maybe some whitefish salad– after a shiva. Now, at the start of the show’s second season — the first episode of which aired early on Amazon this week — we rejoin them at a wedding. The two events,…
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8 Nights, 16 Books: A Book Lover’s Guide to Hanukkah
The holidays are, among many other things, a time for reading and a time for schmaltz. The two, combined, give you a sentiment expressed by the beloved writer Neil Gaiman — whose books, by the way, make for excellent sit-down-and-read-it-in-a-night-as-the-snow-falls-outside fare — when he once said, “A book is a dream that you hold in…
The Latest
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Ranking Woody Allen Lists on His 80th Birthday
In honor of Woody Allen’s 80th birthday, we thought we’d come up with a ranking of Allen’s movies. You know, all the way from #1 (Maybe “Annie Hall” or “Manhattan” or, say, “Stardust Memories” if you’re feeling contrarian) to #46 (how about “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” or “Melinda and Melinda” or “Brooklyn Jazz…
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How Jews Invented American Comedy
The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy By Kliph Nesteroff Grove Press, 448 Pages, $28.00 This book is about comedy, but it’s not very funny. Nor should it be: In his history of American comedy, Kliph Nesteroff writes about “drunks, thieves and scoundrels” — comedians, in a word. His book is…
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Painting the Commandments, All 613 of Them
While Archie Rand was eating lunch at an Indian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village in 2014, his agent told him and his wife that she’d landed a book deal to publish his series of 614 canvases — one per Old Testament commandment and an extra title painting. “I thought that some hippie in Saskatchewan had…
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The Jewish Story Behind the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank
Paul Moritz Warburg, a German-Jewish immigrant who was one of the founding fathers of the U.S. Federal Reserve, had a fervent wish that his creation would be seen as one of America’s great monuments — “like the old cathedrals of Europe.” Warburg’s dream that “the Fed” would become a cherished American institution has never looked…
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A Journey From Auschwitz to Rwanda
Born in 1949, the French author Jean Hatzfeld has focused with sustained attention on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, during which some half a million to a million Rwandans were killed between April and July. The victims belonged to the Tutsi population division, as well as some moderate members of the Hutu majority. Hatzfeld has assembled…
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The Sorrow and Pity of Arthur Miller’s ‘Incident at Vichy’
The trouble with a play like Arthur Miller’s “An Incident at Vichy” is the ubiquitous presence of Holocaust narratives in contemporary films and books. Recently, on NPR’s “Fresh Air” Terry Gross said of the movie “Son of Saul,” “At this point, I don’t want to go to a theater to watch such unbearable suffering unless…
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Why Israel Is One of the World’s Most Financially Literate Nations
Israel ranks among the best in the world when it comes to financial literacy, according to a new survey released by S&P Ratings, Gallup, the World Bank and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC) at George Washington University. “We didn’t have a comprehensive measure of financial literacy that would cover all the countries,” said…
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Law of Conservation of Sadness — Or, When Einstein Lets You Down
On the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Sigal Samuel presents a short story about what happens when the famous scientist can no longer be trusted. I had been dating Ben for two weeks, three days, eight hours, twenty-nine minutes and fifteen seconds when my best friend, Jay, got dumped. I biked to…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
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Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
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