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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Life Is a Chai-Way for Jewish Biker Clubs
When Gil Paul took up the motorbike around 10 years ago, he did a half-hearted Internet search for other Jewish motorcyclists. “I just didn’t imagine that there were Jews that rode,” he said. “As luck would have it, I found the Hillel’s Angels.” Call it luck — mazel, perhaps — but it turns out that…
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Pulitzer Prize-Winning Marilynne Robinson Discusses Her First Trip to Israel
Marilynne Robinson is the Pulitzer and Orange Prize-winning author of the novels “Housekeeping,” “Gilead,” “Home” and the forthcoming “Lila.” Not long before hostilities broke out in the region, she attended the fourth annual International Writer’s Festival at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim cultural center in Jerusalem. Robinson is a committed Christian who grew up Presbyterian and now…
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‘Jews Who Rock’ Only Scratches Surface of Fame and Faith
In the gallery of Jewish Museum Milwaukee, sunlight streams in through windows that display colorful floor-to-ceiling banners from a concert shot taken at Milwaukee Summerfest in 1995. Nearby is a display of a redwood and abalone inlay bass guitar loaned to the museum by members of Howie Epstein’s family. Howie, bassist for Tom Petty and…
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Living Under the Iron Dome
The Middle East conflict: No doubt you have heard this phrase at least a thousand and one times, and so have I. The conflict, as you probably heard over a thousand times too, is the result of settlements. And now that rockets are flying over Israel, I’ve decided to go to the settlements to check…
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Are Michelangelo’s Drawings Anti-Semitic?
Ancestral Torpor: Jews and Christians in the Sistine Chapel By Giovanni Careri Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 325 pages, $36 The American Jewish writer Irving Stone (born Tannenbaum) aptly titled his 1961 novel about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” For centuries, ecstatic tourists have admired the…
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A New Jersey Tale of Two Alfred Doblins — and One Umlaut
I was dozing in front of the TV when I lifted one eyelid to see Rachel Maddow interviewing a man with a trim beard and a startling name: Alfred Doblin. They were discussing Chris Christie and the Bridgegate scandal. Maddow described her guest as the editorial page editor of the Bergen Record, a New Jersey…
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10 things about Jewish New Jersey
It's where Albert Einstein lived, but so much more
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The Origins of Yiddish: Part Fir
In this last of a four-part series about the contemporary controversy over the origins of Yiddish, I’ll begin with the last of the Yiddish linguists profiled by Batya Ungar-Sargon in her Tablet essay, Alexis Manaster Ramer. Born in Poland to Holocaust survivors who came to the United States when he was a child, Manaster Ramer…
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Writing About Gaza From Comfort of Debra Winger’s Manhattan Pad
(Haaretz) — It’s so weird to be writing from here. To be writing from New York, where we decided to make a week-long stop before going on to Illinois. How can I write about what’s happening in Israel when I’m not there? How can I sound credible writing about the children in the Gaza Strip…
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Remembering More Than a Century of Bel Kaufman’s Rebellious Charm
Bel Kaufman, who has died on July 25 at the age of 103, once told an audience at Iona College in 2011: “You’re laughing. It’s a very good sound, the sound of survival.” Born Bella Kaufman in 1911, she is best known as author of the 1965 bestseller “Up the Down Staircase” a fictionalized version…
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Ari Goldman Goes From New York Times Journalist To Amateur Cellist
“One of the messages of the book is that you can’t wait for brilliance.” Spoken by Ari Goldman, veteran journalist for the New York Times, author of four books, including 1992’s “The Search for God at Harvard,” and my former professor at Columbia Journalism School, these words seemed odd to me — the life lesson…
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Opinion The new face of Holocaust denial is harder to spot — and more dangerous
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Fast Forward London’s Metropolitan Police launches new 100-officer unit to protect Jewish communities