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
What’s Eating Phil Rosenthal?
Name-dropping alert! Fifteen years ago I was introduced to Phil Rosenthal by the legendary comedy writer/producer Norman Lear. I was a huge fan of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” which Phil created and executive produced for nine years and for which he won two Emmys, and he said he was a huge fan of my first book,…
-
When Will Anne Frank Enter the Public Domain?
The Anne Frank Fonds was established in Basel, Switzerland, in 1963 by Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, as a charitable foundation. On October 6, the AFF informed Livres Hebdo, a French book trade publication, that the copyright on the “Diary of Anne Frank” would not expire in 2016, as had been expected to…
-
Could Paul Beatty Be the New Philip Roth? Nope, He Just Won the Man Booker Prize.
In May, 2015, we profiled Paul Beatty, author of “The Sellout.” Now that Beatty has become the first American to win the Man Booker Prize, we’re revisiting that article. As it turns out, Beatty isn’t that much like Roth after all — Roth never won the Booker (he did, however, win the Man International Booker in 2011)….
The Latest
-
When Ethel Met (Hurricane) Sandy
My mother would deck me if I gave away her age, but let me just say that Ethel is closer to 90 than to 70. She continues to commute to work as a jeweler on Manhattan’s Bowery jewelry exchange, something she has done for more than 40 years. Depending on traffic, the roundtrip from Long…
-
Art The Case of the Mysterious Photo Box and an Unknown Soldier
About 25 years ago, Alan Teller and Jerri Zbiral bought a shoebox of 127 negatives and prints that they found under a couch at an estate sale in Northbrook, Illinois, near their home in Evanston. Their friend Irving Leiden, who had recently died, had owned the box, and his widow didn’t recall any information about…
-
Forward Archives Are Now Digitized And Searchable
More than a century of Jewish life in America, reported in Yiddish, will soon be accessible through a searchable online database. The entire run of the Forverts newspaper — the most widely read Jewish newspaper in the world for much of the 20th century — will become part of the Historical Jewish Press Project, known…
-
My Big Sabbath Lie — and the Joy It Brought
It is 4 p.m. on a September Friday and I have just completed my first week at one of New York’s august law firms, the kind that prides itself on keeping its junior lawyers toiling into the wee hours and all through the weekend. Yet here I am, heading home to Brooklyn to spend the…
-
Why Tobie Nathan Is the Opposite of Freud
Born in Cairo in 1948, the French Jewish author Tobie Nathan and his family were expelled from Egypt in 1957, during the anti-Jewish persecutions of the Nasser regime. Nathan is an ethnopsychiatrist, a specialist in mental illness in different cultures. He has published books on Sigmund Freud and on the Zionist leader Haim Arlosoroff, among…
-
How Leonid Yakobson Danced Past Soviet Censorship
Choreographer Leonid Yakobson knew how to fight. When he was a teenager in Petrograd, during the freezing anarchy that followed the Russian Revolution, he acquired a set of iron “knuckles” so that he could beat the thugs who wanted to steal his younger brothers’ winter coats. When he was in his late 60s, Yakobson was…
-
Music The First Ever Chinese-Yiddish Song
While writing her Ph.D. dissertation on Jewish Exile in Shanghai resulting from the Shoah, Yang Meng decided she needed to learn both Yiddish and Hebrew for the sake of her research. A Chinese national already fluent in English and German, once she took on the new languages she found herself fascinated by Yiddish, which she…
-
Art Is Donna Karan Offering TMI About DKNY?
One day, when fashion icon Donna Karan was 11, she went up in the attic of her home and discovered old family photos hidden away in a trunk. In one, she saw her mom with an unfamiliar man. When her mother, known as Queenie, discovered her there, she became physically abusive. According to Karan’s newly…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Unarmed man who tackled Bondi Beach Hanukkah attacker identified as Ahmed al-Ahmed
- 2
Fast Forward First Puka Nacua, now Mookie Betts: Why do sports stars keep getting antisemitic around a Jewish streamer?
- 3
Fast Forward After MIT professor’s killing, Jewish influencers spread unverified antisemitism claim
- 4
Opinion I grew up believing Australia was the best place to be Jewish. This Hanukkah shooting forces a reckoning I do not want.
In Case You Missed It
-
Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
-
Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
-
Fast Forward In Reykjavik, Hanukkah offers a chance for Iceland’s tiny, isolated Jewish community to come together
-
Opinion When my children decorate for Hanukkah, I don’t just see pride. I see pluralism in action.
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
