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
When Amy Schumer Met Virginia Woolf
Last week, the news came over the transom, hitting writers’ heads like a 3,000-pound sack of envy: Comedian Amy Schumer will be receiving $9 million for a volume of her memoirs. Even more disturbing was the fact that she’d already returned $1 million, an amount that 10 writers combined won’t earn in two lifetimes, to…
-
Music The Secret Jewish History of Patti Smith
The first words ever uttered by Patti Smith on a recording were “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” the opening line of “Gloria” on her debut album, “Horses,” released 40 years ago this December. That line pretty much set the tone for what was to come over the next four decades. Much of…
-
How Freedom Turned to Propaganda in Soviet Photography
When Alexander Rodchenko took the photograph “Pioneer Playing a Trumpet” in 1930, the Soviet Union had been, albeit briefly, a haven for photographers and filmmakers. The primary reason these art forms flourished there, according to Susan Tumarkin Goodman, co-curator of the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit “The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film,”…
The Latest
-
Books Talking Montreal, Hasids and Bagels With ‘Mystics of Mile End’ Author Sigal Samuel
Sigal Samuel and I grew up in the same city, attended the same college and ended up in the same office. Before that momentous event, our paths had never crossed. (Full disclosure: since then, we have become attached at the hip — or the byline.) I grew up in a secular, if proudly Sephardic, environment….
-
Art Why Netanyahu Still Doesn’t Take Moshe Safdie’s Calls
Moshe Safdie was sitting in a wood-paneled room in the National Academy of Design’s Beaux-Arts mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, surrounded by his drawings and architectural models. Represented among the works by the septuagenarian architect in the exhibit “Global Citizen: The Art of Moshe Safdie” were materials related to some of his Israeli projects:…
-
David Gregory Meets His Faith
‘I don’t get this right all the time. Faith is hard. I do still get angry and hurt by it. But I aspire to do better. I’m not going to allow myself to be consumed by disappointment by how I left. This is a rough business.” The speaker is David Gregory, former moderator of “Meet…
-
Resisting the Familiar Narrative of Resistance in France
How could anyone govern a country, Charles de Gaulle once asked, that has 240 different kinds of cheese? Less well known is the question he posed as leader of the Free French during World War II: How can anyone liberate a country that has nearly the same number of resistance movements? Okay, he didn’t really…
-
How the All-American Nose Job Got a Makeover
When Jaclyn Trop was thinking of getting a nose job at age 20, she sought counsel from her college professor. Her women’s studies class at Boston University had just finished a unit on cosmetic surgery — the professor had characterized the practice as “symptomatic of internal loathing,” Trop said — and Trop wondered if she…
-
Our Lives With (and Without) Chantal Akerman
Sometime over last weekend, Chantal Akerman, the Belgian-French-Jewish filmmaker, committed suicide. Her body was found Monday. Her latest film, “No Home Movie,” a verité account of her mother’s decline and death, received its local premiere at the New York Film Festival this week in the immediate aftermath of Chantal’s own death. At the end of…
-
Art Gego Draws a Line at the Holocaust
The show currently on display at Dominique Lévy’s gallery on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and devoted to the works of the artist known as Gego, is called “Autobiography of a Line,” after an early art book made by Gego herself. The title suggests something deeply personal, but the show offers something more oblique, more obscurely…
-
Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize Is Tribute to Her Fight Against Anti-Semitic Belarus Tyrant
Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature October 8, is a banned author in her homeland of Belarus, as she explained in a 2013 interview with Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster. Her books are neither published nor discussed in the media there. Due to government persecution, she left Belarus from 2000 to…
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
