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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So, Why Are All Podcasters Jewish Anyway?
Jews dominate podcasting. Don’t believe me? Put away your mah-jongg, grandma, because today we’re counting Jews. A list of hosts of the top podcasts in iTunes reads like a passenger manifest on the Exodus: Ira Glass (“This American Life”), Robert Krulwich (“Radiolab”), Peter Sagal (“Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”), Stephen Dubner (“Freakonomics Radio”), Terry Gross (“Fresh…
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Books ‘I Think You’re Totally Wrong’ Goes to Hollywood
Photo courtesy Rabbit Bandini Productions Capital punishment. Bungee jumping. Cormac McCarthy. Waterboarding. Jackson Pollock. “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Abortion. Rupert Murdoch. The Seattle Mariners. The war in Iraq. The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” Disneyland. Balding. These are just few of the subjects David Shields and Caleb Powell cover in their new book, “I…
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Celebrating the Life and Career of Yiddish Theater Legend Mina Bern
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. A large crowd filled the main auditorium at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan on January 11 to see a memorial program in honor of the life and work of the Yiddish actress Mina Bern. During the concert a dozen singers, actors and musicians performed…
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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…
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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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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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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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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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