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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A Rude Awakening in Indiana’s Marshmallow Country
This past Labor Day weekend we celebrated the 125th anniversary of a synagogue to the sounds of AC/DC, rumbling Harleys, and the Blake Shelton song, “Kiss My Country Ass.” The synagogue was none other than Ahavath Sholom, built in Ligonier in Noble County, Indiana in 1889, and the music, well, it was part of Ligonier’s…
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Neil Diamond Goes Back Home to Brooklyn
Who says you can’t go home again? Singer Neil Diamond returned to Brooklyn Monday for a surprise performance at the high school he attended in the 1950s. Hundreds of fans lined up outside Erasmus Hall High School in the Flatbush section hoping to snag free tickets to hear a rare intimate performance by the entertainer…
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Maybe Eichmann Wasn’t So Banal
● Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer By Bettina Stangneth, Translated from German by Ruth Martin Alfred A. Knopf, 608 pages, $35 It seems a stretch to think of Adolf Eichmann as having had an “unexamined life.” Since his 1960 trial in Israel, and Hannah Arendt’s controversial 1963 account, “Eichmann in…
The Latest
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Books All the Jewish Superheroes
Courtesy AH Comics If you had asked me, when I was a comic book-loving Jewish girl coming of age in 1960s Detroit, besotted with Batman and following Superman’s every adventure, what I wanted to do when I grew up, I may well have described exactly what Steve Bergson does today. Bergson is a “comics scholar.”…
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In Search of the Bibi Haters in Israel
Ten young people, more or less, were congregating in front Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence late on a Saturday night and repeatedly shouting, “Bibi, resign! Bibi, resign! Bibi, resign!” Bibi didn’t seem to be here; in any case, he wasn’t answering. It was August, during the height of the conflict, and the young people here were ultra-rightists,…
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How Sigmund Freud Almost Fell Victim to Repression and Denial
(Haaretz) — On March 13, 1938, the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society met for the last time; it called on members of the group to flee Austria, which German troops had entered the day before. According to biographer Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud opened his remarks by noting how, after the destruction of the…
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The Banality of Himmler
Heinrich Himmler: Nazi, anti-Semite, lover, husband, father, workaholic. Mass Murderer. The genius of “The Decent One,” Vanessa Lapa’s disturbing new documentary about the man most directly responsible for the extermination of over six million Europeans, mostly Jews but also gypsies, gays and anyone else deemed unworthy by the Nazi regime, is that she in no…
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Why Isn’t Dolph Schayes as Famous as Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg?
● Dolph Schayes and the Rise of Professional Basketball By Dolph Grundman Syracuse University Press, 224 pages, $24.95 Basketball player Dolph Schayes should be as famous as baseball slugger Hank Greenberg. Like Greenberg, Schayes was the first Jewish star in his sport. During his playing career, from 1948 to 1964, Schayes was a 12-time All-Star;…
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Books Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman Tell a Whopper With Everything in It
● The Golem of Hollywood By Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman Putnam Adult, 560 pages, $27.95 Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman’s father-and-son opus, “The Golem of Hollywood,” is as ambitious as it is completely ridiculous — and that’s not altogether a bad thing. The novel’s protagonist captures some of the story’s scale and confusion: Jacob Lev is…
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Where Jonathan Tropper Departs From Reality
As someone who didn’t grow up in the United States, watching Hollywood films can sometimes be tricky; it’s hard to tell what the filmmakers made up and what represents reality. When I moved to the United States two years ago, it wasn’t like I expected to encounter action heroes who never need toilet breaks, background…
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7 Best Scenes From Three Decades of Coen Brother Films
This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, “Blood Simple.” Since then, the pair have written or directed eighteen of the wackiest, funniest, and most memorable movies of all time. Here are seven of the greatest scenes from the Coens’ impressive catalogue: 1. Fargo – “He’s a little guy,…
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