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
-
How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Vladimir Jabotinsky
Jabotinsky: A Life By Hillel Halkin Yale University Press, 256 pages, $25 Hillel Halkin’s new biography, “Jabotinsky: A Life,” features as its frontispiece a 1918 photograph of the activist and author in his British military uniform. It’s an excellent choice of illustration that captures several of the paradoxes of his character. The baby-faced infantry officer…
-
Cliffs’ Notes on Jabotinsky
Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky was a Zionist activist almost from the get-go. He was born in 1880 in Odessa, Ukraine, a Black Sea city that was home to the 19th-century Jewish intellectual and literary elite of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. He spent his early years as a journalist in Europe and in Russia; he mastered…
-
Diving Back Into Henry Roth’s Streams of Consciousness
Mercy of a Rude Stream By Henry Roth Liveright, 1312 pages, $39.95. Henry Roth was rediscovered twice. In 1964, 30 years after the debut of “Call It Sleep,” an enticing new paperback edition and ecstatic praise from Irving Howe on the front page of The New York Times Book Review catapulted Roth’s neglected masterpiece onto…
The Latest
-
Searching For the Soul of Menachem Begin
Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul By Daniel Gordis Schocken, 320 pages, $27.95. Menachem Begin was one of the more complex personalities in Zionist history. Certainly, he was among the most controversial, and his story has been oft-told. Amos Perlmutter’s 1987 “The Life and Times of Menachem Begin” was conceived as a political biography,…
-
Does Translating Yiddish Preserve History Or Betray It?
Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the 20th Century By Anita Norich University of Washington Press, 160 pages, $30 Translators are villains, lechers, traitors. Like the spinster who translates Yankel Ostrover’s stories in Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” they are vain. “Who has read James Joyce, Ostrover or I?” she seethes. “I didn’t…
-
Frederic Brenner, the ‘Jewish Christo,’ Uses Photography To Challenge Israel Debate
‘What do you see?” asked the French-born photographer Frédéric Brenner while showing me his new book, “An Archeology of Fear and Desire,” during a recent interview in the Manhattan offices of one of his longtime funders, the Revson Foundation. His photography books, among them 1996’s “Jews/America: A Representation” and 2003’s “Diaspora: Homelands in Exile,” with…
-
Books When Getting Girl Means Pretending To Be Transgender
Photo: Chloe Aftel Call it a boy-meets-girl-who-thinks-boy-was-born-a-girl story. In “Adam,” the debut novel from cult graphic memoirist Ariel Schrag, an awkward California teenager named Adam Freedman parachutes into an alien landscape of subcultures and identities when he joins his lesbian sister in Brooklyn for the summer. (Full disclosure: Schrag was featured in “Graphic Details: Confessional…
-
How the Forger of Brighton Beach Duped The Claims Conference
A Replacement Life: A Novel By Boris Fishman Harper, 336 pages, $25.99 Like the Soviet Union, from which its main characters hail, Boris Fishman’s debut novel, “A Replacement Life,” is a good idea in theory, if not in execution. After his grandmother dies, aspiring writer Slava Gelman is asked by his grandfather to forge a…
-
A Funny Thing Happened On My Way to the Rolling Stones Concert
On a third floor balcony across the street from me in central Jerusalem, a strange ceremony is taking place. On one side of the balcony stands a heavy-set religious man with a an oversized white dress and a huge black skullcap, and on the other side an attractive young blond woman, dressed in colorful clothes,…
-
Michael Shannon Makes Eugene Ionesco’s Disorienting ‘The Killer’ Memorable
The first task would be to describe the play. In the case of the production of Eugene Ionesco’s “The Killer” currently running at Theatre for a New Audience, this is not so easy to do. We open on Berenger (Michael Shannon), the shambling existentialist everyman who frequently leads us through Ionesco’s plays, touring a neighborhood…
-
Books David Bezmozgis Turning ‘Natasha’ Into Film
Photo: David Franco A decade after its publication, Canadian author David Bezmozgis is turning his debut short story collection, “Natasha and Other Stories,” into a film. As with “Victoria Day,” his first cinematic endeavor in 2009, Bezmozgis, a graduate of the University of Southern California’s film school, is both writing and directing the project. The…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Unarmed man who tackled Bondi Beach Hanukkah attacker identified as Ahmed al-Ahmed
- 2
Fast Forward First Puka Nacua, now Mookie Betts: Why do sports stars keep getting antisemitic around a Jewish streamer?
- 3
Fast Forward After MIT professor’s killing, Jewish influencers spread unverified antisemitism claim
- 4
Opinion I grew up believing Australia was the best place to be Jewish. This Hanukkah shooting forces a reckoning I do not want.
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
-
Fast Forward In Reykjavik, Hanukkah offers a chance for Iceland’s tiny, isolated Jewish community to come together
-
Opinion When my children decorate for Hanukkah, I don’t just see pride. I see pluralism in action.
-
Fast Forward ‘The most Australian name’: Matilda, the youngest victim of the Bondi Beach attack, embodies a nation’s grief
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
