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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Why Robert Stone Was One of Greatest Non-Jewish Jewish Writers
Robert Stone wasn’t Jewish, of course. He was a lapsed Catholic. I am writing about him here because his sixth novel, “Damascus Gate,” was a retelling of the Shabtai Tzvi story, set amongst drug-addled wanderers in Jerusalem in the 1990s. It’s a book deeply engaged with Judaism, kabbalah, and the meaning of monotheism. It is…
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Books National Jewish Book Award Winners Are Here
The Jewish Book Council has announced the recipients of the 2015 National Jewish Book Awards. The council began giving out this award — the most prestigious of its kind — in 1948. Past winners include Philip Roth, Chaim Potok and Cynthia Ozick. It’s a pretty important way of giving recognition to the year’s most outstanding…
The Latest
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The Amazing Man Who Watched Jewish History Unfold in Maryland
A new exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Maryland sheds light on the experience of Jews in 19th-century America, through the lens of one man who saw and did it all. Colonel Mendes Cohen — who was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1796 and settled in Baltimore, then the country’s third largest city, at the…
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Remembering Elsa Cayat, Slain in the Charlie Hebdo Massacre
In a nervous, jittery country where one in three people pops psychotropic pills, Elsa Cayat, the French Jewish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was murdered in the Charlie Hebdo offices on January 7, was among France’s calming influences. In such books as “Desire and Whore: the Hidden Stakes of Male Sexuality” and “A Man + a…
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Love, Death and Math in Wisconsin
● The Mathematician’s Shiva By Stuart Rojstaczer Penguin Books, 384 pages, $16 If you have never heard of the Navier-Stokes problem in mathematics, after reading Stuart Rojstaczer’s rollicking first novel, “The Mathematician’s Shiva,” you might claim to know something about it, though explaining its significance to a friend may remain impossible. The story revolves around…
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Film & TV Isaac Bashevis Singer and His ‘Harem’
In Yiddish theater lore it’s told that when the great actor and heartthrob Boris Thomashefsky mounted a production of “Hamlet” on Second Avenue, the sign outside read, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Translated and Improved.” The story is apocryphal — it might not have been Thomashefsky, and it might not have been “Hamlet” — but the episode illustrates…
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Why Wisconsin Was a Great State To Grow Up Jewish
In 1946, I came to America as a poor immigrant boy with my parents. I didn’t have much say in the matter, being only 1 year old. My folks, Srulik and Faygeh Puchtik, later changed their name to Porter, like all the other Porters who came to the goldene medine, since it was easier to…
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Why Wisconsin Was a Terrible State To Grow Up Jewish
My early childhood was spent in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington D.C., which at that time in the early 1970s was a uniquely progressive place. Our lower-middle-class neighborhood, large looping cul-de-sacs of red-brick row houses, contained a more diverse population than anywhere I’ve lived since. Black, white and brown people, Christians, Jews, Hindus and…
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What Ari Roth and Theater J Could Have Learned From the Jewish Conciliation Board
These days, privacy seems to have gone the way of the rotary phone, overtaken by the contemporary yearning for transparency, accountability and the ubiquitous selfie. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that conflict — be it domestic or institutional — is increasingly played out in the public sphere. It’s not enough that we now know…
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Sacvan Bercovitch, Acclaimed Scholar and Translator of Sholem Aleichem, Dies at 81
There can be no greater left-wing yichis than being named after Sacco and Vanzetti. The Canadian Jewish cultural historian Sacvan Bercovitch, who died on December 9 at age 81, was born to Russian Jewish parents who cherished a revolutionary ideal. In his “Rites of Assent,”, Bercovitch explained that he was drawn to America’s Puritans because…
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Jewish Cartoonist Georges Wolinski Among the Dead in Paris Terrorist Attack
Today’s terrorist attack in Paris on the editorial offices of the satirical magazine has left a reported twelve people dead. Among the deceased is the 80-year-old French-Jewish Georges Wolinski cartoonist who was the subject of his wife Maryse Wolinski’s 2012 memoir, “George, If You Only Knew.” According to Benjamin Ivry, writing for the Forward on…
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Opinion I first met Netanyahu in 1988. Here’s how he became the most destructive leader in Israel’s history.
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