Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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Film & TV In ‘The Rehearsal’ season 2, is Nathan Fielder serious?
The comedian is out to solve an epidemic of airplane crashes — will the world listen?
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Of Bill Clinton, Bagels and 9 Other Things About (Jewish) Arkansas
1) 1,725 Jews live in Arkansas. 2) In the early 1820’s, Abraham Block, a store owner, became the first Jew to settle in Arkansas. 3) Little Rock’s B’nai Israel, founded in 1866, is the state’s oldest Jewish congregation. 4) In the early 1880’s, a group of Jewish pioneers from New York founded the Am Olam…
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In Angouleme, Israeli Cartoonists Talk About Charlie Hebdo — And BDS
The International Comics Festival opens this weekend in Angouleme, France. Just like last year, SodaStream is one of backers of the festival. And once again, another petition to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel has popped up, calling on the festival’s organizers to refuse any funding and cooperation with Israeli companies. Last year, BDS’s main…
The Latest
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How Franz Schubert Found Himself in Shul
Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs By Graham Johnson Yale University Press, 3,000 pages, $300 A few months before he died in 1828 at the age of 31, Franz Schubert produced a setting of the 92nd Psalm, Tov Lehodot La’Adonai. Yet, as Graham Johnson asks in his massive new compendium about the Austrian composer, “How many…
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Bernice Gordon, Jewish Crossword Maven, Dies at 101
Readers who try to solve a crossword puzzle with the clue “One of the Marxes” (answer: KARL) or “Old Broadway title beau” (answer: ABIE) are enjoying the concise wit of Bernice Biberman Gordon, a constructor of crosswords or cruciverbalist, as puzzle writers like to be called nowadays, who died on January 29 at age 101….
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Ze’eva Cohen Documents Her Gliding Career at Age 74
Ze’eva Cohen is tidying up her desk. The modern dancer who enjoyed a blaze of celebrity in the 1960s and ‘70s has reached the age where securing her place in history feels more urgent than satisfying a restless impulse to move. It’s too soon to say that she will never autograph another playbill, or smile…
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The Powerful Example Of The Jewish Abolitionists We Forgot
The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States — Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in late January 1865 — comes at an fraught moment in the history of race relations. Considering that black men are being killed by police at the same rate as they were lynched in the era of Jim Crow,…
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Books Why People Leave Orthodoxy — and How
Becoming Un-Orthodox By Lynn Davidman Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $27.95 In “Becoming Un-Orthodox,” a study of ex-Orthodox Jews by University of Kansas professor Lynn Davidman, a woman identified only as “Leah” describes Friday night meals in her parents’ home. “Shabbes was kind of a wash,” she says. “My father was always tired and so…
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Cookbook Collector Savors Recipes for Living in Michigan
For a woman her age, Jan Longone moves incredibly fast when she’s eager to point something out. The 81-year-old with a plump, soft face and fierce eyes direct from yenta central casting demanded that attention be paid to a French guidebook from the 1960s, open to a page with the loopy autograph of the then-up-and-coming,…
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How Ruby Namdar Wrote the Great Hebrew American Novel
I met Reuven “Ruby” Namdar on November 11, 2014 in New York, because I was writing a long piece about writers who live outside Israel and write in Hebrew. It turned out, by coincidence, that a few hours before our meeting he had gotten the biggest news of his career. He had been informed that…
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Granddaughters of the Shoah
Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind By Sarah Wildman Riverhead Books, 400 pages, $27.95 A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France By Miranda Richmond Mouillot Crown, 288 pages, $26 The latest Holocaust memoirs are by people who weren’t there, who are linked to the tragedy by the…
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Of Gilda Radner, Ivan Boesky, Boisterous Brisket and 9 Other Facts About Jewish Michigan
1) 82,270 Jews live in Michigan. 2) Michigan’s first Jewish settler was Ezekiel Solomon. A fur trader, he operated a general store during the Revolutionary War. 3) Montreal-born fur trader Chapman Abraham was Detroit’s first Jewish settler, arriving there in 1762. 4) Founded in 1885 in Traverse City, Congregation Beth El is Michigan’s oldest synagogue….
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