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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Art
How Ann Weiss Restored Humanity to the Victims of Auschwitz
In October of 1986, as a delegation of Jews active in community affairs toured a closed Auschwitz-Birkenau, investigative journalist Ann Weiss fell behind the others. “A need for solitude compelled me to linger behind, Weiss said of confronting 30,000 shoes that once belonged to prisoners. “Alone, I studied their broken forms, and thought of their…
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A Personal History of Sports and Anti-Semitism
I thought about sports and anti-Semitism after reading about an extraordinarily ugly incident at a recent Dutch soccer game. And I realized that in my 44-year career at The New York Times, covering about 8,000 events, I personally witnessed only two such moments. And I wrote about only one other. I never was the object…
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Film & TV Can You Imagine Your Friend Dying? Try Filming It Over and Over Again.
Over the past three years, filmmaker Josh Seftel has filmed a murder, a suicide and a stroke. He has filmed obesity, loneliness, homelessness and alcoholism. And a sad birthday party or two. The subject of these scenes is always the same: photographer Philip Toledano, who plagued by fears of his own mortality, decided to create…
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A Pogrom Against Warsaw’s Jews
1915 • 100 Years Ago Yente Telebende, a regular Forverts character created by B. Kovner, chimed in on the death of the great writer I.L. Peretz. When Telebende saw the photograph of Peretz on the cover of the Forverts, she clicked her tongue, clapped her hands together and yelled out: “What? Your shoshalists got another…
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A Girl is Born in Brownsville
1915 • 100 Years Ago A young man from Amboy Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn came bounding into the offices of the Forverts to tell the editors an odd story about a set of parents tricked by their newborn baby. When the baby was born, it entered the wide world with such a…
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A Piece of Unsolicited Advice for the Hasidic Community
A version of this essay appeared in Yiddish here. I was never really a Hasid. Sure, I looked like a Hasid, I quacked like a Hasid, and I even sometimes felt like a Hasid, but inside I never was one. I didn’t understand it at the time, and I denied it for years, but looking…
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Searching for My Indian Jewish Family, From Kabbalah to Bollywood
MUMBAI — On my first morning in India, I found myself staring at an egg. That and a cup of coffee was all my hotel’s “free continental breakfast” amounted to, but I didn’t feel cheated. I felt vindicated. After all, I’d come to India because of an egg. I cracked the hard-boiled shell and peeled…
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HomeLands: Happy Chaos in Worcester
The Forward interviewed Aviva Fellman, 33, the rabbi at in Worcester, Massachusetts, and her husband, Ari Fellman, 32, an Israeli electronic engineer currently working at EMC. The two have been married for four and a half years and have two children — Hadar, 3, and Idan, 22 months. In addition, the family is hosting a…
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The Price of Redemption
Everything has its price. For the redemption of a firstborn son, the Torah is quite specific: Numbers 18 instructs that the first son to pierce his mother’s womb belongs to God. You can bypass a life of priestly service through the pidyon haben, the ritual of redemption, held 31 days after the son’s birth. During…
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Of Stephen Sondheim, the Marx Brothers and 12 Other Things About (Jewish) Pennsylvania
1) 293,240 Jews live in Pennsylvania. 2) One of the most prominent early Jewish residents of Pennsylvania was Isaac Miranda, who emigrated From France in 1712 and became Lancaster’s first Jewish resident. A businessman and Indian trader, he had a large collection of Jewish books. 3) Pennsylvania’s oldest synagogue is Congregation Mikveh Israel, founded in…
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Remembering More Than a Century of M.H. Abrams
Many people forget their English professors as soon as the last exam has been passed, but Meyer Howard Abrams, who died on April 21st at the age of 102, was an exception to this and other general rules. Abrams, who signed his books M. H. and was known to friends and colleagues at Cornell as…
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