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
-
Revisiting the Jewish Crime of the Century
Compulsion By Meyer Levin Fig Tree Books, 480 pages, $15.95 Why, in 2015, should we be interested in a novel that was written 60 years ago? Moreover, why are we interested in a crime that was committed 90 years ago? When I was growing up in New York in the 1950s, there was no one…
-
Film & TV With ‘I Believe in Unicorns,’ Leah Meyerhoff Rewrites The Modern Love Story
Leah Meyerhoff is tired of the straight, white, male perspective. The 35-year old director sat in a small back room at the IFC Center on Tuesday morning and emphatically expressed her desire for new voices to populate the big screen. “I think female filmmakers who have been shut out of the process and whose voices…
-
Film & TV A Year for Women as Natalie Portman and Amy Winehouse Debut at Cannes
It’s official. After 67 years of presenting the best of testosterone-driven cinema from the world over, the Cannes Film Festival made the discovery that women too can direct. At least, that’s what I take it the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis meant when she irritatingly dubbed this the “Year of la Femme,” in reference to…
The Latest
-
A Jewish Art Paradise at the Vatican
A Jew visiting Rome with the hope of finding some aspect of her heritage may be drawn to the synagogue on the banks of the Tiber River, or to wander through the ghetto, perhaps to sample carciofi alla Giudia, Jewish-style artichokes. She is unlikely to consider the Vatican to be a source of Jewish art….
-
Remembering the Glorious Jewish Humanity of Anne Meara
Anne Meara, who died on May 23 at age 85, was considerably more than one-half of the beloved comedy act Stiller and Meara. Born into a Roman Catholic family, she converted to Reform Judaism in 1961, as she told “People Magazine” in 1977, because she “wanted my children to know who they were.” Those children,…
-
Why Satmar Hasidim Are More Liberal Than Liberals
In the past few years I’ve been spending much of my time outside of New York, but now I’m here and I find that coming back is a bit challenging. When I’m in town I’m oblivious to the changes happening around me. Yes, I have eyes and I can see the changes but more often…
-
Who Should Replace Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic?
Earlier this year, Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, announced that he would step down from his job in 2017. With Avery Fisher Hall, the orchestra’s home, scheduled to close in 2019 for two years of renovation, fevered speculation has ensued about his successor. Music directors should quit more often, as such…
-
Yiddish Sex Tips for Girls Find Home in Jerusalem Library
A few months ago, Dr. Yoel Finkelman was browsing through the catalog of the New York auction house Kestenbaum & Company; it’s a regular chore at the National Library’s collections department. He noticed an interesting item. Finkelman, the curator of the library’s Judaica collection, noticed a Yiddish pamphlet titled “Advice for Women and Young Women…
-
The Nakedness of the Bible
The Jews and the Bible By Jean-Christophe Attias, translated by Patrick Camiller Stanford University Press, 256 pages, $22.95 The greatest irony of the Bible is that it stands for the opposite of irony — certitude, transcendence, holiness — yet it is filled with nothing but irony. A truly bizarre anthology of contradictory texts is regarded…
-
Dream Home in Greenwich Village
Faye Ginsburg, 62, is a professor of anthropology at New York University in lower Manhattan. She is also the director of the Center for Media, Culture and History, co-director of the Council for the Study of Disability and president of the . Her husband, Fred Myers, 66, is also a professor of anthropology at NYU….
-
A New Arab Museum on the Periphery
“Our trip is canceled. The atmosphere in Sakhnin is very tense.” It was December 10, 2014, the night before I was due to visit the newly established Arab Museum of Contemporary Art, in Sakhnin, an Arab-Israeli city in the north of the country. I had received the phone call from the Haifa-based, Romanian-Israeli artist Belu-Simion…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News A pioneering Reform synagogue makes way for a booming Iranian Jewish community
- 2
News Hampshire College closure reverberates for alumni who treasured a Yiddishist hub
- 3
Opinion Who’s responsible for deadly antisemitism? Everyone will hate the answer
- 4
Opinion Viktor Orbán may fall. Netanyahu should be next
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Who’s responsible for deadly antisemitism? Everyone will hate the answer
-
Looking Forward Stumbling across Jewish history in a vintage store
-
Film & TV Remembering Siskel and Ebert’s great debate: Mel Brooks or Woody Allen?
-
News A Jewish gun club teams up with the NRA, in pursuit of self-defense
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
