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
-
Memoirs of Harry Rosenfeld, Newspaperman Who Survived Kristallnacht and Covered Watergate
If you’re lucky and smart, life as a newshound means that your day job consists of being a semi-ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances. You invariably sidle up to history — and its makers — just by showing up for work. As a boy growing up in Hitler’s Berlin, Harry Rosenfeld, author of the new…
-
Music Lies and Silence Surround Kosher Slaughter Scandal in Poland
(JTA) After a Polish court tossed out a government regulation permitting kosher slaughter in 2012, Poland’s $500 million ritual slaughter industry was expected to be brought to its knees. Evidence shows, however, that not only was kosher slaughter still being performed in Poland as recently as this month, but also that kosher meat producers had…
-
Music Poland Official In Hot Water Over Drunken ‘Heil Hitler’ Outburst
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Thursday he is considering the future of a senior party ally who is alleged to have drunkenly shouted “Heil Hitler!” at a German airport official. The incident involving Jacek Protasiewicz, vice-president of the European parliament, is embarrassing for Poland because it has been trying to put aside wartime…
The Latest
-
Why Jews Stood Up for Richard Wagner
There’s an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which Larry David is caught whistling Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” to his wife in front of a movie theater. A hysterical and unhinged nudnik accosts him, spouting the common litany of charges against Wagner (“history’s biggest anti-Semite,” “millions of Jews marched to the gas chambers with Wagner’s music…
-
Murder of Jewish Teenager in Damascus Sparks Panic Among Syrian Jewry
1913 •100 years ago Witnesses Recant in Leo Frank Case A second witness in the Leo Frank case in Atlanta has come forward to say that prosecutors swayed him to provide false testimony during the trial that led to Frank’s conviction. A 15-year-old paper boy, George Epps, now contends that he was coached to testify…
-
Books Did Dreyfus Affair Really Inspire Herzl?
The idea that the trial of Alfred Dreyfus inspired Theodor Herzl to write “The Jewish State” is “simply not true,” Shlomo Avineri declared in a pointed, fluent, and well-received lecture that opened the first full day of London’s Jewish Book Week on February 23. Discussing his biography of the father of modern Zionism, “Herzl: Theodor…
-
Harold Ramis Was All of Us
Ask any fan of the 1981 comedy “Stripes” about their favorite scenes from the film, and a sizeable percentage will recall the one where Bill Murray and Harold Ramis, seeking to escape their respective dead-end existences, visit a local Army recruiting office. Murray gets most of the laughs in the scene, but Ramis gets off…
-
Who Cares if Movies Are Historically Accurate?
It is depressing to read so many articles decrying the historical inaccuracies in recent movies, whether dealing with outer space, the southern slave trade, Somali pirates, or Walt Disney, articles in which the least deviation from the historical record or “reality” (a word Nabokov insisted routinely belongs within quotation marks), is held up against the…
-
Teenage Immigrant Busted for Pimping Women in Lower East Side Tenement
1913 •100 years ago Jewish Immigrant Arrested for Pimping After only eight months in the country, 17-year-old immigrant Arthur Goldman was sentenced to a stint in jail after being arrested as a pimp. His unfortunate story has more to do with his aunt, Fanny Bailik, who lived with Goldman in a tenement on Norfolk Street…
-
Kenneth Bonert’s ‘Lion Seeker’ Is Best New Novel You Haven’t Read
I first heard of Kenneth Bonert’s “The Lion Seeker” maybe a year ago when I was having lunch with Harcourt Houghton Mifflin executive director of publicity Lori Glazer at some hoity-toity place in Union Square whose name I forget. Yes, this is a boring way to start a story, but bear with me because there’s…
-
11 Best Performances by Non-Jewish Actors Playing Jews in the Movies
Observers of the convergence of Jewish and mainstream American culture will be keeping a close watch on this year’s Academy Awards in which — for the first time in movie history as far as the Forward can tell — the two leading contenders for the Best Actor award are non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters. In…
Explore
Most Popular
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Actually, Trump made things between Israel and Iran way worse
-
Film & TV ‘Fantastic Four: First Steps’ sends The Thing to shul — and gives Jack Kirby credit
-
Fast Forward As starvation mounts in Gaza, Jewish voices increasingly rise up in consternation
-
Fast Forward Grossinger’s iconic rye bread rises again — and won’t require a Catskills trip to obtain
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
